Wild Sorrow (27 page)

I looked at my reflection in the mirror and saw a stranger there, a woman with a bulging red lip so swollen on one side that her nostril was partly occluded by it. The cheek on the same side ballooned as if it held half a day's rations—and the skin was already turning blue.

I ran cold water in the sink, and—not caring that my hair would get soaking wet—I bent over and put my whole face under the surface and watched the blonde wisps float like they did when I was dreaming with the trees. Only this time, the tendrils reached downward. I raised up and let my hair drain into the sink, then blotted my head gently with a towel, but it hurt so much I gave up and just let the water run down my skin inside my nightgown.

With great difficulty, I eased myself onto the toilet and sat for several minutes trying to relax my aching abdomen enough to pee. When I finally did, I felt a grabbing pain in my left kidney. I gasped and started breathing hard, rapidly in and out, like a woman in labor, and finally the flow stopped, and with it, the searing pain. When I got up to flush, I saw blood in the water in the bowl.

I picked up the gunnysack Tecolote had given me and went to the kitchen for a spoon. While I was there, I fished out the package of goat meat and put it in the fridge. I would give it to Mountain tomorrow. Back in my bed, I opened the bag. Inside, the big jar of soup had been wrapped with a piece of cloth and tied with string. I spooned the cold broth gently into the good side of my mouth and forced myself to suck it down. I did the same with the applesauce, not because I was hungry, but because I knew Tecolote had made this as medicine for me, and it would probably have more curative power than anything that came from a pharmacy.

After, I could hardly hold my eyelids open. I propped myself up against the headboard on my pillows with my rifle and handgun as my sleeping companions. As I turned out the light, Mountain set up a howl from his confinement on the strong chain, but I could not muster the energy to go out and bring him in. Besides, Kerry would be back soon. Just before I dropped off to sleep with the sonorous song of my beloved wolf in my ears, I looked out the window into the darkness and saw a cold, dense fog rolling in.

Double Entendre

When I woke, Kerry was sitting in one of the wooden kitchen chairs reading a book, his rifle on the table in front of him. I looked down and saw Mountain snoozing on his lambskin rug beside the bed. I put one hand to my face and felt gently around my mouth and cheek with my hand. My face was still swollen, but not as much as it had been last night.

I pulled myself up in the bed. Kerry turned to look. “Good morning,” he said.

I tried to smile, but it hurt.

“Come with me to Santa Fe today,” he said, helping me up and toward the bathroom.

“I can't,” I said, my voice hoarse, my body stiff. “I have to go to the pueblo. I promised Momma Anna I would help deliver the Christmas baskets.”

“You can't do that, you're hurt. They can get someone else to help with the baskets.”

I turned and looked at him. “I told Momma Anna I would do it. Those old women used up their gas money to buy candy and other things to put in those baskets. It's the least I can do.”

“But you're hurt. The doctor said you had cracked ribs.”

“I'm getting used to this,” I said, moving gingerly across the room. “I'll bet this is the way a football pro feels on the morning after a game. If those guys can do it, so can I.”

Kerry shook his head. “I wish I could help. I would take the baskets around for you if I could. But I have to turn in some paperwork at the Santa Fe office for that job application.”

By that time we had reached the bathroom door. I stopped and faced him. “I'll be all right. I'm just going to drive. Momma Anna and the aunties are taking the baskets in the houses.”

“At least you'll be with other people,” he said, brushing a wisp of hair from my face and then turning to go back to his chair. “There's safety in numbers.”

“Yeah, that's what everyone seems to think, anyway.”

 

 

The women were gathered once again at Momma Anna's house when I arrived. In the main room, the baskets that they had prepared the week before were lined up across the floor, their cloth coverings pulled back. The aunties, who had been baking and cooking for days, moved among them adding coffee cans full of posole, plastic containers of elk meat chili, loaves of fresh-baked pueblo bread, assortments of decorated cookies, and pocketlike prune pies to the array of goodies they had already packed into the baskets earlier.

Momma Anna came up to me as I stood just inside the door, watching the activity. “Eeeee! You got more hurt.”

“Yeah, I got more hurt.”

“This time, you look like somebody beat you.” Her face was full of concern.

“That's right,” I said. “Two men.”

“What they do?” she said, anger rising in her voice.

“Just a couple of bad guys. They jumped me and beat me up.”

Momma Anna reached a hand out and tenderly touched my cheek. “Eeeee! I go get you some snow,” she said, and she turned and went toward the kitchen. I went to the kitchen table and sat down to watch the ladies as they finished their project. Momma Anna came through the back door with a pan full of snow. “It nice shady by fence, no wind there,” she said. “Snow stay long time.” She packed the white stuff into a dish towel, rolled it up, and handed it to me.

I pressed the cold pack to my face.

By this time several of the aunties had come to examine me and make exclamations of shock and worry. It seemed that each of them had a home remedy to recommend.

“My sister got a drunk for husband,” Yohe said. “He beat her all time. She put that cactus jelly on her face. She say it best cure.”

“Best cure that one,” Momma Anna said, “big stick. Crack him over head, he don't come home drunk maybe.”

When the goods had all been distributed, and the cloth covers tied once again over all the baskets, the women gathered in the kitchen. “Now we burn cedar,” Momma Anna said, and she went to the woodstove for her little cast-iron skillet. From a micaceous pot that she had made with the figure of a small bear perched on the lid, she spooned out some cedar tips into the pan, struck a stick match on the rough cast-iron bottom, and then lit the cedar. It flared, then smoldered, glowing red.

The women formed up in a circle and as Momma Anna carried the smudge from one to another, they fanned it toward their faces, washing themselves in the smoke. When the time came for Yohe to bathe in the cleansing vapor, she began to pray aloud: “God, please bless our people, bless our old ones, bless our children, bless this white girl, she get all better, nobody beat her no more.”

 

Anna Santana and I made five trips before we got all the baskets delivered. Mountain lay in the back of the Blazer, and we stuffed six or seven baskets in behind him each time, then ventured out on the ice-packed dirt roads around the pueblo. As we jostled over the rattle-boards and ruts, the little plastic seat belt cutter clacked and clattered as it bounced against the gearshift knob. Finally, I was so annoyed by the noise that I slipped the short elastic leash off the shifter and stuck the small tool into the back pocket of my jeans. The brass wildlife identification tags hanging from Mountain's collar jingled, too, as the Chevy's suspension shuddered over the dips and drops in the narrow dirt lanes. Momma Anna turned to look at the wolf in the back. “Wolf sound like he got sleigh bell,” she chuckled. “Jingle bell, jingle bell,” she sang, pointing to Mountain with a smile.

We took the baskets to run-down adobes with sweet-smelling smoke twirling from the chimneys, to the small, thick-walled apartmentlike dwellings in the big adobe structures on the village plaza, and to stick-built HUD homes out on the flatter ground west of the village, where horses with shaggy winter coats stood and stamped in the snow, their breath fogging in the cold. At each place, I forced myself to get out of the car and help Anna get a basket out of the back; then she would scurry to the door, wrapped in her blanket, and spend a few minutes making the delivery while Mountain and I waited in the Blazer. By the time we had made the final round, my joints had loosened up from all the movement, and although I was still bruised and painfully sore, I found myself feeling a little better for having done some easy work. The swelling in my face had also gone down considerably after I had applied the cold compress my medicine teacher had made for me from the snow.

We delivered the last basket to Sica Blue Cloud Gallegos. I went with Momma Anna to her door. Sica greeted us with a smile and asked us in.

“We got work do,” Anna said. “We got mud and snow on boot. Happy Christmas.” She set the big basket on the floor just inside the door.

“Wait,” the old auntie said, and she hobbled away for a moment, then returned. She held out a hand to me, her fingers closed over something in her palm.

“What's this?” I asked.

“Take it. You will see.”

I opened my palm and the old woman dropped two small, shining black stones into my hand. “Obsidian?” I asked.

“Apache tear. For the deserter boy. You keep. Happy Christmas.”

“Happy Christmas, Grandmother,” I said.

As I followed Momma Anna out to the car, I saw Eloy Gallegos heading toward his auntie's house. “You go ahead,” I said to my medicine teacher. “I'll just be a minute.”

Gallegos approached me. “How are you today?” he said, smiling, giving a little nod. “I thought you would still be in the hospital.”

“I need to tell you something. I'm grateful for what you did last night—”

“It was nothing.” He shook his head as if to dismiss it.

“I wasn't finished.”

Gallegos raised his chin and studied my face, but he didn't speak.

“I don't change sides. You need to know that. I think I've figured out what you've been up to, and as soon as I have the proof, you're going to pay.” We stared at one another for a few moments, and then I dipped my chin ever so slightly and walked around the man and on to the car where Momma Anna and Mountain were waiting.

Back in the Blazer, I sat looking out the windshield, without starting the engine.

“You got angry heart,” Momma Anna said.

I let out a big breath. “I do.”

“Eloy?”

I nodded my head. “He seems like he's so good to Auntie Sica. But he's not what he seems. He's sick with greed. He's a monster as a landlord, lying, stealing, even endangering my friend's life with his greed—my life, too—causing people pain, and not caring that he does.”

My medicine teacher was quiet for a moment. Then she spoke. “You got Apache tear. Hold up to light.” She pointed a finger at my hand.

I held one of the stones between my fingertips against the window. With the light behind it, the black obsidian appeared almost clear, as translucent as a tear.

“You see that? That our sorrow, tear freeze like ice.”

“I don't understand.”

“This time, some sadness too big, our heart cannot heal. Some thing too evil, some thing too dark. We not understand, our mind cannot hold it all. We try, our spirit grow sick and weak.”

“Like the Indian school?”

She nodded. “We have no way understand that. We have no way. We cannot. We need put that sadness someplace so our heart can live. Not enough power heal that, not this time. Maybe next other time.”

“So, you . . . choose not to feel it.”

“No! We all time feel it. We choose not carry it, not hold it. We ask Grandmother Earth, Father Sky hold it, that way we use heart for love, not for sadness.”

I opened my palm and looked at the two stones.

“We all got them,” Momma Anna said. “That one man live here, he keep the sheep. His father Tanoah, but his mother Apache. Those boy, his relative. He bring us those stone. They have legend, next other place about Apache tear, women cry for brave lost in battle. But we cry here for those boy, and for Tanoah children, too.”

“The man who brought these to all of you here at the pueblo, is his name Daniel Kuwany?”

“That the one. He say he not forget his relative. Sometime he forget about sheep, though. He go off and leave them, go out there somewhere, wander off. He go for days, come back drunk. Take everybody long time, round up sheep.”

As I drove Anna home, I said, “I keep running into stories about that abandoned Indian school. Everywhere I turn, I find another person who attended there, another sad story. And lately, I've had a lot of bad things happen to me that I don't understand—horrible things, abuses that came at me out of nowhere, like this beating. I'm just trying to get through but I'm confused and out of my element, and I don't understand what's happening. It makes me think of how the children must have felt when they went to that school.”

“They children in story. This time, everybody all grown up.”

“Sometimes I think that children who have suffered a lot never really grow up. They look like it, but part of them is still trapped in the past and can't move on, like those Apache tears.”

“You grow up just fine.”

“I know. But I can relate to all the stories because I knew a lot of pain and misery as a child, especially because I was abandoned by my mother.”

“You always have good mother right there,” Anna said.

“No. No, I didn't. My mother left when I was very small. I didn't really have a childhood. My father started drinking soon after that.”

“Your mother all time there for you, maybe you just not see her.”