Wild Indigo (6 page)

His eyes darted briefly to my face, then away again. He looked alarmed. “You know, things have just been hard for some people,” he said, and he turned abruptly and walked to a slick red Mustang convertible parked beside the station. He got in and looked at me in the rearview mirror. Then he fumbled in his shirt and drew out a small pouch. He appeared to be rummaging through it for something, then withdrew pinched-together fingers. He made a little gesture, circling his head with one hand, and then he threw something over the side of the driver's door. I saw tiny particles sprinkle toward the asphalt. Gilbert started the engine, backed out of his parking place, and drove away.

I went to the place where he'd been parked and studied the ground. Tiny specks of something white and granular clung to what appeared to be crushed chile seeds, little clumps of which were embedded in the pits of the asphalt. I wet my finger and pressed against a pocket of the stuff, and then I examined the tip of my finger. I sniffed, then I tested it with my tongue.
Salt. Chile. And something bitter, acrid. But what?

Momma Anna would know. I'd seen her make that same gesture before, with a similar concoction. It was at the bake.

Earlier in the summer, I had been privileged to be a part of what Momma Anna called a “bake.” Her grandson was to marry. For several weeks, ceremonies and rituals prepared the couple for the sacred vows they were about to take. Elders gathered at the family homes and shared their experience and wisdom with them. The two lovers were kept apart during this time while their families questioned them about the seriousness of their intentions, the extent of their commitment, and the possibilities of both failure and success in the lifelong journey of marriage. Finally, they were gathered together, along with their clans, at the end of these arduous few weeks, and there was much feasting and gift giving.

Throughout the long period of instruction, there had been feasting every night. But for this last night before the wedding, when the two clans came together, the responsibility for the largest repast of all fell on the family of the groom.

In preparation for this final banquet, the night before it was to take place, a dozen women gathered at the home of my medicine teacher—just an hour after all the food had been put away and the dishes washed from the large meal for the Santana clan that evening. It was late by then, and we were just beginning. Anna's son Frank, father of the groom, brought in three large plastic trash cans with lids. Lupé, his wife, carried huge galvanized washtubs, the kind you might set out in the yard to shampoo a big dog. A pair of young men set up two long wooden benches in Momma Anna's living room. Others carried in twenty-five-pound bags of flour, and one of these was emptied into each of the twelve washtubs, which sat in a row, six on each bench.

“You! White Girl!” One of the pueblo women pointed to me. “Pull back hair.”

I gathered my tresses into an elastic band and pulled them back at the nape of my neck. I rolled up my sleeves, ready to do anything that was required of me.

The women giggled and spoke to one another in Tiwa. One of them said in English: “Let White Girl do it.”

Lupé pointed at a washtub. “Get ready,” she said. I went to stand beside the vessel she had indicated.

Serena mixed yeast with warm water in a large camp-style coffeepot, stirring the slurry with a wooden spoon. She poured some into the first few tubs, then went to make more. An auntie I knew, Momma Anna's sister-in-law Yohe, went about with a ten-pound sack of salt and a measuring cup, doling some of the seasoning into each tub. Lupé came with a bucket of rose water to each woman's starting mixture. She peered in and determined how much was needed, then tipped the bucket and poured what she judged to be the right amount of the liquid into each vat, often adding as much as a gallon or more of the rose-scented water. Another woman took large cans of shortening, one to each tub, and paddled the goop out and into the flour. Then the work began.

The women bent over from the hips and plunged their large, round upper bodies into the tubs, working deep inside with their hands and arms, muscling around the mixture within until they had huge balls of dough. I followed suit, but found the quantity of flour, shortening, water, and salt made for tremendous resistance to my every attempt to shape and form it. I felt like I was wrestling a giant jellyfish. I couldn't lift the enormous ball of dough because it was too heavy, and I could barely manipulate it to incorporate in the pan. This fact was not missed by the Tanoah women—all of them laughed at me. Finally a woman everyone called Auntie, who was easily three times my age and looked soft and dumpy for all I could see, shoved me aside. “Let me do, White Girl,” she said.

And into the vat her arms and elbows went. She pounded and pressed, lifted and plopped, and thwacked and smacked the great dough ball until it looked like a living thing, massive and elastic. The kneading went on all around me.

“Come here,” Momma Anna said. “Do mine. I need rest.” I reached into the vat and pounded on her beautifully formed globe of dough. I punched as fiercely as I could, and then worked hard to try to turn and press and knead the stuff, but it resisted me. Eventually another elder pushed me aside. “White Girl weak,” she said, and everyone laughed.

At last another auntie found a job for me that I could do. She showed me how to grease the trash cans completely with a thick coating of the shortening. To do this, I had to lay the cans on their sides and crawl in, glopping the stuff on the bottom first, and then working my way back up to the rim in a circular pattern. When I emerged, I had shortening on my forehead, shoulders, and upper arms. The ladies laughed at me. “Silly White Girl,” one said.

The dough was dumped into the trash cans and covered to rise overnight. It was time to wash up the tubs and put them away. “Let White Girl do,” Yohe said.

While the bread makers sipped coffee at the kitchen table, and giggled and talked with one another, I worked at the sink to clean the large tubs. Auntie brought in a big basket of gifts she'd prepared for the couple. She showed them to Lupé, holding up bolts of fabric, pot holders, a skillet, and—saving the best for last—a beautiful Pendleton blanket. All the women made enthusiastic oohs and aahs for every item. Lupé started to cry, and Serena got up from the kitchen table to fetch a box of tissues. The others patted Lupé and made little comforting whimpers along with her.

Momma Anna got up from the table and came to see how I was doing at the sink. I whispered, “Why is Lupé crying?”

“She lose son. He got new parent now, not her son no more. These two children, when marry, choose sponsors, new parent. Lupé not mother to her boy now.” She shook her head with concern, pressing her lips together and making a little sharp sound with her tongue. She filled her coffee cup and went back to the table.

When I finished washing and drying all the big tubs and the other implements from the dough making, the women jumped up with amazing vigor and started carrying the tubs outside. They took the benches out, too, and the remaining flour and other supplies, all moving as spryly as if they'd not done a thing all day.

While the rest of the women busied themselves with loading their trucks and cars, Momma Anna headed behind the house to the edge of the field with a determined look on her face. I followed her and watched her reach into her pocket and unfold a cotton hankie. Her fingers drew up a pinch of the mixture inside—it looked like chile seeds, salt, and something yellow. She circled her head with her clamped fingers, then sprinkled the offering onto the slight nighttime breeze. She looked at me with her lips pinched together tightly. “That for Lupé,” she said. “That kind sadness, she cry over lose her son, that need healing, or we all get sick, wedding go bad.”

She was quiet a moment, then barked at me, “You come three in morning. Don't be late. You be fire bringer,” she said.

I asked her what this meant but she pressed her lips together tightly.

“Anything I need to bring?” I tried.

“Pull back hair,” she said.

I barely slept that night, and when I arrived at three a.m., I could see fires already burning in the back of the two large hornos that had been built especially to handle the tremendous volume of baking needed for this three-week event. I found Momma Anna among the women, all of them busy chopping off hunks of dough from the full mounds swelling out the tops of the trash cans.

“You're so la-ate!” Momma Anna whined. She handed me a can of shortening, a giant stack of aluminum pie plates, and a piece of cotton. She made a little circular motion with the cotton, demonstrating how to grease the pans. “Get pan ready,” she said.

“Yah,” another elder joked. “White Girl maybe can do that!” All the women laughed.

As fast as I could grease the pie plates, the women slapped and punched and formed the dough into perfect rounds to put into them. When we had well over two hundred of them lined up on two outdoor picnic tables, Yohe deemed it time to start baking.

She dipped an old, blackened deerskin in a big bucket of water, then fetched a long aspen pole and tied the wet hide onto one end with some sinew that had already been soaked. Yohe used this implement to swab out the ashes and pull live embers left in the hornos out and onto the packed dirt in front of the ovens, removing all the live fire and ash. Then she reached in her pocket and removed a stem of straw. She held this in one horno, and I watched it burst into flame after only a few seconds. Yohe nodded—the temperature was perfect.

Serena fetched a long paddle and headed for the door of one of the hornos. She laid the peel flat and the women began bringing the pans of bread dough, lining them up six at a time on the blade of it, and while Serena shoved these into the hornos, the dough brigade shuffled back and forth from the picnic table to the paddle with more pans. They loaded the peel again and again. We managed to fit over 125 pans in each oven.

Frank lifted large, flat chunks of sandstone into place, using them as doors to close up the hornos. There was a tiny glimmer of green light along the edge of the horizon, against a deep indigo sky full of stars. It would be dawn within the next hour or so.

The women hurried back inside to take the bits of remaining dough and shape them into cookies, making intricate ropes and forming them into flat panels that looked like Celtic knot-work, each cookie as large as a man's hand. They sprinkled these with colored sugar, taking great care to create as beautiful a masterpiece each time as they could.

Momma Anna had me fry sausage and scramble two dozen eggs while the artisans prepared their work. When the women had designed several hundred cookies, they came in the kitchen and got breakfast and ate it hurriedly from foam plates, slurping more coffee as they ate.

They rose from the table at some unheard signal and filed outside. It was time to remove the loaves of bread.

After the stones were rolled back from the openings, Yohe manned the paddle and started removing the loaves from the hornos. The women put padded oven mitts on their hands and began scuttling back and forth from the ovens to the picnic tables. Golden brown domes of bread, their smell warm and yeasty and delicious, lined up like soldiers in long, even rows. I noticed that there was none of the usual chatter, that the women were working in silence. I used a dish towel to maneuver the hot pie plates and keep the rows straight. When all the bread was out of the ovens, the cookies were put in just as the loaves had been. A few women also brought out loaves of store-bought sliced white bread and threw the pieces randomly onto the hot stones on the floor of the hornos. The doors were left slightly ajar for this last round of baking. Lupé went into the house and came back with a small cast-iron skillet. Inside, I saw the green tips of cedar. She struck a wooden kitchen match against the bottom of the pan and when the flame was ready, she put it to the cedar and held it there until the smudge began to make smoke. The women lined up along either side of the two tables, and Lupé passed by each one of them fanning the smoke onto them and onto the loaves of bread. The aunties and grandmas gathered the smoke into the palms of their hands and used it to wash their hair, their faces, their upper bodies. They turned their eyes skyward. Then they helped to fan the smoke across the rose-scented bread.

When my turn came, I inhaled the sharp, clean smell of the burning cedar and washed myself in it. I saw the sun peek over the shoulder of Sacred Mountain and make a starburst of shooting rays into the gray dawn sky.

While the other women carried the cooling loaves into the house, I saw Momma Anna walk behind the hornos, into the shadows. I followed her, and as before, she removed her hankie, circled her head with pinched fingers, and sprinkled her potion into the air.

“Is that for Lupé again?” I asked.

She said nothing.

“Is she still sad?” I tried.

She turned to me and gave a rare, tender smile. She blinked both eyes. “That for you. You got no family. Only that wolf.”

Later, as I washed the pie pans from the bake and the women shoved the cooled loaves by the dozens into plastic bags and then into the trash cans to transport to that evening's feast and giveaway, I said to Momma Anna, “Boy, this baking is a lot of work!”

She looked at me and snorted. “This one easy. We not make prune pies this time. Most time, we do prune pies right after cookies.”