You've Got to Read This (85 page)

"What are
you
doing? Don't you know you can't do things like this, you can't do whatever you want to do, even if other people aren't about? You will be sorry if you do not do what you should do. You can't carry on like
DELMORE SCHWARTZ • 479

this, it is not right, you will find that out soon enough, everything you do matters too much," and as he said that, dragging me through the lobby of the theatre, into the cold light, I woke up into the bleak winter morning of my twenty-first birthday, the window-sill shining with its lip of snow, and the morning already begun.

The M a n t o S e n d

R a i n C l o u d s

by Leslie M a r m o n S i l k o

Introduced by Louis Owens

THE FIRST TIME I READ "THE MAN TO SEND RAIN CLOUDS," I WAS UNDER

a canvas tarp in Arizona's White Mountains, listening to a thunderstorm that seemed to be walking right up the river canyon. The flashes of lightning and sound came simultaneously, and the thunder had the almost painful metallic crack that meant it was directly overhead. The summer monsoon season was strangely late and hitting the San Carlos Apache Reservation pretty hard. I'd backpacked in alone to do some reservation fly-fishing, and each day a thunderstorm had rumbled in at about one o'clock in the afternoon and stayed for three hours before clearing out. In three days I had seen elk, deer, black bear, ospreys, bighorn sheep, golden eagles, beavers, wild turkeys, quail, rattlesnakes, and much more, but as far as people went there wasn't even a footprint. I had the river to myself. I had sat on top of a bluff and watched a black bear fishing for crawdads and seen an osprey come in low over my head to take a trout a hundred feet upstream. I had watched a large male coyote take a new fawn away from its desperate mother, almost hating the coyote for the laughing ease with which he succeeded. And each day I had caught big heavy rainbows, one after the other.

For two afternoons I had sat out the storms by hunching into myself and going into a kind of rain sleep, a trancelike musing upon the meaning of life, the morning's fishing and the late-afternoon fishing to come, but on the third day I was restless. That was when I pulled out the book I'd brought along, a collection by the Laguna Pueblo writer Leslie Silko. I'd talked—

probably too much—about how I admired Silko's novel
Ceremony,
so a friend in Flagstaff had shown up on the eve of my fishing trip with a book called
Storyteller,
insisting that it was the perfect backpacking companion. I'd accepted with proper gratitude but looked at the volume with disgust. It was too big, oddly shaped, at least two pounds, and while I lied to my friend, I knew
Storyteller
would never make it into my backpack. I'd stopped taking books backpacking years before after realizing that reading is the last goddamned thing I want to do when I'm alone in the mountains.

But at the last second—out of guilt, no doubt—I stuck the ungainly book in the top of my pack, and it was there when I set up camp seven miles down the river. Waiting for the storm to pass, I read "The Man to Send Rain Clouds." And then I immediately read it again.

The second time through I realized what a superb piece of writing it was. There is a wonderful beauty about the story, as clean and sparse as the New Mexico landscape where it's set. Like Hemingway at his best, Silko leaves almost everything out. Maria Chona, a wise Papago woman, once said, "The song is very short, because we understand so much." Silko communicates this in "The Man to Send Rain Clouds." She presents a Pueblo
INTRODUCTION BY LOUIS OWENS • 483

world with simple and profound clarity—no sentimental posturing, no romantic lens filter, no explanation. She expects us to enter the terrain of the Pueblo world the same way the priest in the story .does, through an accommodation made with understanding and, above all, respect. We know we are outsiders, but we are drawn into that space between Catholic priest and Pueblo family, bridging the distance and, like the priest, allowing feeling to displace the need for empirical knowledge. Silko makes us, above all,
feel
this world.

"The Man to Send Rain Clouds" is a story about our common humanity and our common bonds with the natural world. It doesn't lecture us about the syncretic strength of the Pueblo world, that dynamic which allowed the Indian people of the Southwest to subsume Catholicism so easily into their own traditions. Instead, it shows us.

Narrated in the third person, primarily from the point of view of a family going about the business of burying their dead grandfather, the story speaks to us as though our understanding is a given. As the old man is found and prepared for burial, nothing is explained. Told with precision and care, the story deals with the dead grandfather in a loving, matter-of-fact manner. A man of obvious dignity and significance in life—he is tending sheep alone when death comes—the grandfather remains significant in death. He still has an important role to play in the life of the pueblo, for it is the responsibility of the dead to bring the rain.

Just as the Indian people in the story allow the priest to have a place in their world, the story allows us to participate, no questions asked. But it never panders to us the way weaker fiction does, trying to attract or entice us. Everything is conducted with an attitude of dignity and tact. And that, I realized finally, is where the amazing power of this story comes from. It is, in a diffidently Indian way, a supremely tactful story. Like a well-cast dry fly, it insists upon nothing, but graciously presents itself in a matter-of-fact, superbly understated manner. We rise to the level of the story and are eased into another world, knowing the rain will be back tomorrow. The artifice is dazzling.

For traditional Native Americans, however, words have real power.

Words bring-into-being and compel the real world to order and significance.

The storyteller bears enormous responsibility. In every line of "The Man to Send Rain Clouds," we feel the narrative's consciousness of such power and responsibility. As Silko showed us in
Ceremony,
a story is more than artifice; each story is a ceremony, and every ceremony changes the world.

T h e M a n t o S e n d Rain C l o u d s

Leslie M a r m o n Silko

T
hey found him under a big cottonwood tree. His Levi jacket and pants were faded light blue so that he had been easy to find. The big cottonwood tree stood apart from a small grove of winterbare cottonwoods which grew in the wide, sandy arroyo. He had been dead for a day or more, and the sheep had wandered and scattered up and down the arroyo. Leon and his brother-in-law, Ken, gathered the sheep and left them in the pen at the sheep camp before they returned to the cottonwood tree. Leon waited under the tree while Ken drove the truck through the deep sand to the edge of the arroyo. He squinted up at the sun and unzipped his jacket—it sure was hot for this time of year. But high and northwest the blue mountains were still in snow. Ken came sliding down the low, crumbling bank about fifty yards down, and he was bringing the red blanket.

Before they wrapped the old man, Leon took a piece of string out of his pocket and tied a small gray feather in the old man's long white hair. Ken gave him the paint. Across the brown wrinkled forehead he drew a streak of white and along the high cheekbones he drew a strip of blue paint. He paused and watched Ken throw pinches of corn meal and pollen into the wind that fluttered the small gray feather. Then Leon painted with yellow under the old man's broad nose, and finally, when he had painted green across the chin, he smiled.

"Send us rain clouds, Grandfather." They laid the bundle in the back of the pickup and covered it with a heavy tarp before they started back to the pueblo.

They turned off the highway onto the sandy pueblo road. Not long after they passed the store and post office they saw Father Paul's car coming toward them. When he recognized their faces he slowed his car and waved for them to stop. The young priest rolled down the car window.

"Did you find old Teofilo?" he asked loudly.

Leon stopped the truck. "Good morning, Father. We were just out to the sheep camp. Everything is O.K. now."

"Thank God for that. Teofilo is a very old man. You really shouldn't allow him to stay at the sheep camp alone."

"No, he won't do that any more now."

"Well, I'm glad you understand. I hope I'll be seeing you at Mass this week—we missed you last Sunday. See if you can get old Teofilo to come with you." The priest smiled and waved at them as they drove away.

484

LESLIE MARMON SILKO • 485

* * •

"We found him under a Cottonwood tree in the big arroyo near sheep camp. I guess he sat down to rest in the shade and never got up again."

Leon walked toward the old man's bed. The red plaid shawl had been shaken and spread carefully over the bed, and a new brown flannel shirt and pair of stiff new Levi's were arranged neatly beside the pillow. Louise held the screen door open while Leon and Ken carried in the red blanket.

He looked small and shriveled, and after they dressed him in the new shirt and pants he seemed more shrunken.

It was noontime now because the church bells rang the Angelus. They ate the beans with hot bread, and nobody said anything until after Teresa poured the coffee.

Ken stood up and put on his jacket. "I'll see about the gravediggers.

Only the top layer of soil is frozen. I think it can be ready before dark."

Leon nodded his head and finished his coffee. After Ken had been gone for a while, the neighbors and clanspeople came quietly to embrace Teofilo's family and to leave food on the table because the gravediggers would come to eat when they were finished.

The sky in the west was full of pale yellow light. Louise stood outside with her hands in the pockets of Leon's green army jacket that was too big for her. The funeral was over, and the old men had taken their candles and medicine bags and were gone. She waited until the body was laid into the pickup before she said anything to Leon. She touched his arm, and he noticed that her hands were still dusty from the corn meal that she had sprinkled around the old man. When she spoke, Leon could not hear her.

"What did you say? I didn't hear you."

"I said that I had been thinking about something."

"About what?"

"About the priest sprinkling holy water for Grandpa. So he won't be thirsty."

Leon stared at the new moccasins that Teofilo had made for the ceremonial dances in the summer. They were nearly hidden by the red blanket. It was getting colder, and the wind pushed gray dust down the narrow pueblo road. The sun was approaching the long mesa where it disappeared during the winter. Louise stood there shivering and watching his face. Then he zipped up his jacket and opened the truck door. "I'll see if he's there."

Ken stopped the pickup at the church, and Leon got out; and then Ken drove down the hill to the graveyard where people were waiting. Leon knocked at the old carved door with its symbols of the Lamb. While he
486 • THE MAN TO SEND RAIN CLOUDS

waited he looked up at the twin bells from the king of Spain with the last sunlight pouring around them in their tower.

The priest opened the door and smiled when he saw who it was. "Come in! What brings you here this evening?"

The priest walked toward the kitchen, and Leon stood with his cap in his hand, playing with the earflaps and examining the living room—-the brown sofa, the green armchair, and the brass lamp that hung down from the ceiling by links of chain. The priest dragged a chair out of the kitchen and offered it to Leon.

"No thank you, Father. I only came to ask you if you would bring your holy water to the graveyard."

The priest turned away from Leon and looked out the window at the patio full of shadows and the dining-room windows of the nuns' cloister across the patio. The curtains were heavy, and the light from within faintly penetrated; it was impossible to see the nuns inside eating supper. "Why didn't you tell me he was dead? I could have brought the Last Rites anyway."

Leon smiled. "It wasn't necessary, Father."

The priest stared down at his scuffed brown loafers and the worn hem of his cassock. "For a Christian burial it was necessary."

His voice was distant, and Leon thought that his blue eyes looked tired.

"It's O.K., Father, we just want him to have plenty of water."

The priest sank down into the green chair and picked up a glossy missionary magazine. He turned the colored pages full of lepers and pagans without looking at them.

"You know I can't do that, Leon. There should have been the Last Rites and a funeral Mass at the very least."

Leon put on his green cap and pulled the flaps down over his ears. "It's getting late, Father. I've got to go."

When Leon opened the door Father Paul stood up and said, "Wait." He left the room and came back wearing a long brown overcoat. He followed Leon out the door and across the dim churchyard to the adobe steps in front of the church. They both stooped to fit through the low adobe entrance.

And when they started down the hill to the graveyard only half of the sun was visible above the mesa.

The priest approached the grave slowly, wondering how they had managed to dig into the frozen ground; and then he remembered that this was New Mexico, and saw the pile of cold loose sand beside the hole. The people stood close to each other with little clouds of steam puffing from their faces. The priest looked at them and saw a pile of jackets, gloves, and scarves in the yellow, dry tumbleweeds that grew in the graveyard. He looked at the red blanket, not sure that Teofilo was so small, wondering if it wasn't some perverse Indian trick—something they did in March to ensure a good harvest—wondering if maybe old Teofilo was actually at sheep camp corralling the sheep for the night. But there he was, facing into a cold dry wind and squinting at the last sunlight, ready to bury a red wool blanket
LESLIE MARMON SILKO • 487