Land of Echoes

45

They sat on the bare ground. The family had set up camp back by the big sheep shed: smoldering fire pit, pots and pans hung on posts, plastic water carrier, rumpled sleeping bags. Cree smelled the coffee before she sat down and her whole being cried out for a dollop of it. Ellen found a pair of tin cups and poured murky coffee from the smoke-blackened percolator.

The afternoon air was cool. Cree sat near the fire where she could pick up a little warmth from the coals, breathing the pinon smoke and burning her lips on the metal rim of the cup. From here, she could see east, past fences to higher land half a mile away, more thickly covered in trees and brush. The sun was lowering to the west, putting the near ground in mixed shadow and sunlight.

"You've done this before?" Ellen asked doubtfully. "Fought with a chindi?"

Cree grinned. "I know I don't look like I know what I'm doing. But the answer is yes. That's what I do. I investigate ghosts and I help people who are troubled by them."

Ellen nodded and blew across her cup.

"Actually, I try not to fight it. I have to… let it into me a little, so I can know more about it. It's very powerful, isn't it? Don't you feel it, too-the way it sort of hypnotizes you?"

"Oh, yeah." Ellen's big face moved into that warm grin. "I was trying to think what it was like. I keep remembering this one time I went to New York City with my first boyfriend. It was this big thing for us, catching the Greyhound in Farmington, crazy rascal Navajo kids going to take the Big Apple by storm. We got there on a Saturday night and we were so excited, first thing we did was go barhopping with this couple our age we'd met on the bus. We drank way too much. And later on in this one place, I went looking for the bathroom and by mistake I went out the back door into the alley. I stood there in the dark, looking at these brick walls, and I didn't know where I was. I turned around and then I couldn't tell what door I'd come out of, there were three, four dirty gray metal doors, all the same. Middle of the night, and I didn't know what place I was in, or who I was to find myself in such a strange place. Couldn't move. Didn't know what to do. That's what this chindi does to me."

Ellen sipped her coffee with a faraway look in her eyes, but she came out of the pensive mood with a throaty laugh. "It didn't help that there was this sign in Korean or Chinese or something on the other side of the alley-it could have been written in Martian! Luckily, my boyfriend came looking for me. You can bet I didn't drink again for the rest of that trip."

"I had a night like that in Dublin once," Cree admitted. "My husband and me, our first night there. Ouch."

They shared a smile, and Cree felt like sidling over and warming her hands on the glow from the solid, square woman. They both sipped their coffee. The black mud went down hot and stayed burning in Cree's belly, fortifying her. In the deafening silence, they listened for sounds from the hogan and heard nothing alarming.

Ellen's face grew tight again. "I was going to say, that's the scariest thing, but it's not. The way his hand moves when he's asleep-that's the worst."

"What did it do?"

"It did this"-Ellen mimed a beckoning gesture-" and then it kind of spidered around." She made her hand walk along the ground on all five fingers and grope the contours of a rock, then snatched it back as if the sight scared her. Her plump body shuddered involuntarily.

Even in Ellen's imitation of the gestures, Cree couldn't help but see the intentionality of the movements. The hand adapted to what it felt. It seemed to be trying to figure out where it was. There had to be some self-awareness in this ghost, but like everything else about it, it was incomplete, skewed, somehow isolated in the hand and arm of its unwitting host. A blind being lost in time and space. Lost in Tommy's body.

Cree replenished her coffee and poured some into Ellen's cup. "So you folks live up in Burnham now? Eric was telling me."

Ellen looked relieved to put the subject of the hand behind them. "Yes. We lived on the old place with my parents and Tommy's folks until about ten years ago. First we moved the sheep up there, there's better water and road access. Then I got a job, secretary at the grade school. My husband took a job at the El Paso Gas plant. We still keep a few of our own sheep, but we only help out with the big flock when Ray needs extra hands. We've been after my parents to move closer in, but they won't leave the old place."

Cree nodded. "Were you here for the hand trembling?"

"Oh, yeah. Old Hastiin Begaye came up on horseback. Just about killed him, I think, he's eighty-two."

"What do you think of his diagnosis?"

Ellen looked worried again. "All these years, I'd say I didn't believe that stuff but I'd go along. Kind of hedge my bets? And I think the old ceremonies do good for people. But with Tommy this way.. " Clearly, Tommy's possession had erased any doubts Ellen might have had. She whispered, "Hastiin Begaye, he was scared. He said it's the worst he's ever seen. He tried to look like this was business as usual, but I could tell he was glad to get out of here."

"What ceremony did he prescribe?"

"Two ceremonies. The first will be the Evil Way. That's to get rid of the chindi, to give it what it wants, let it have justice. The second we'll do in a month or so. That's the Beauty Way."

"What does that one do?"

"It's to restore Tommy to harmony and unity. Make him healthy and strong after the ghost goes. Hastiin Begaye said Tommy is divided inside, that's what makes him weak and unhappy. He needs to be just one person."

Cree was struck by the insight of the diagnosis. As Joseph had said, he was a boy at odds with himself. Some of it was ordinary teenage stuff-trying to differentiate between himself and his parents or grandparents, loving them yet needing to rebel. But it was amplified by his conflicted sense of what it meant to be Navajo in twenty-first-century America, and by his disconnection from his dead parents, his yearning and resentment, curiosity and confusion. Tommy was divided, not certain which image of his past or future to embrace. Which meant that getting the ghost out was only half the battle. Beauty Way: a way to make him whole. The Hand Trembler must be a very perceptive man. Again, it all came down to who Tommy was.

"Ellen, can I ask you about Tommy?"

"If I know the answer."

Cree tried to think of a way to circle in on it. "Your brother-did he have any other children besides Tommy?"

"No. He and his wife, they got kind of a late start. Then they got killed. You know about that?" Ellen looked away, saddened by the memory.

"Yes."

"Tom, my brother, he was a good guy in a lot of ways, but later on he got to drinking and it made him a little crazy. Funny, because Bernice, his wife, she went the other way-when he first brought her home, she was pretty freewheelin'. But then she settled down and was a good mother. A good sister to me. We still miss them both."

Cree nodded. "Does Tommy look like your brother?"

Ellen turned to look at her closely, troubled by the question. "Why do you ask that?"

"Did they adopt Tommy, or-?"

"No!"

"Are you sure? I mean, could they have-"

Ellen burst into laughter again, shaking her head at the crazy bilagaana and her outlandish questions. "I'm about as sure as I can get! Tommy was born on the old place, right in my brother's house. Bernice looked like she'd swallowed a watermelon for the last three months. When it was time, she came on fast, one minute she's making fry bread and the next she's got contractions five minutes apart. We couldn't chance putting her in the truck to go to the clinic, she'd never make it. I was the one who caught Tommy from between her legs. I rubbed him until he made his first cry, then I cut his cord myself. That sure enough for you?"

Ellen looked at her with brown eyes that were puzzled, amused, and completely candid. There was no doubting the truth of what she said.

So there it was, at last. Tommy was not Julieta's child.

Cree thought of Julieta and her longing for her lost baby and her deep sense of recognition and all the waiting and yearning over the years: a beautiful, intelligent, dynamic woman who lived and worked so hard while struggling to conceal the deep wound so close to her heart. A weight fell on Cree in a heap, not so much the fatigue of the last week as the sorrows of lifetimes. She knew she should probe Ellen for information about Tommy's mother and father, try to learn more about who they were, what they wanted, how they lived. But right now she was too stunned. She realized yet again how much she had relied on Julieta's connection to Tommy as her one handle on the situation. How much she'd trusted it. How much she'd wanted Julieta to have found her child.

The bitter emptiness was all too familiar. The power she'd given Julieta's supposed connection to Tommy said a lot about where Cree Black was in her own life.

"What?" Ellen asked. "What's the matter?" She watched Cree, worried at the sudden change in her odd guest.

"Nothing," Cree said hoarsely. How would she break it to Julieta? "Nothing. Really."

And that about summed up her progress, Cree thought. Now she was left with nothing. As Julieta was.