Sacred Clowns

Chapter 24

JIM CHEE, born to the Slow Talking Dinee’, born for the Bitter Water Clan, whose real, ceremonial, and secret name was actually Long Thinker, awoke on the floor of Gracie Cayodito’s hogan just when dawn was invading the extreme eastern edge of the night. He was awakened by the voice of his uncle, who was standing outside the east-facing door of the hogan, singing his blessing song to the new day.

As Chee lay there, stiff from a night on this unyielding bed and still only half-awake, a second voice joined the husky baritone of Frank Sam Nakai. This one was older, cracked and scratchy – the sound of Hosteen Barbone shouting his greeting to the great yei Dawn Boy. Normally, Chee sang his own dawn prayer a bit later, after he’d started the coffee perking and the eastern sky was red with morning. He groaned, pushed himself upright, tucked in his shirt, and fished out from under it the buckskin medicine pouch, which contained his corn pollen. When in Rome, he thought, one does as the Romans do. He didn’t want to worsen the bad impression he had already made on these old men.

But later, with the sun up and the town of Window Rock in view through his windshield, he was pretty sure the perfect knowledge he’d displayed of the morning blessing hadn’t made any difference. The problem was the generation gap. The problem was theological. The problem was how one defined the concept of hozho, that idea of harmony which was the very root and foundation of the Navajo religion. This kind of problem wasn’t what he wanted when he’d gone back up the mountain to find his uncle again. He’d been in a crazy mood. Having that hit-and-run case turn out the way it did had been the last straw. Too much ambiguity, uncertainty, indecision. He wanted no more of that. He would go to the mountains and get a ruling on whether he could marry Janet Pete and still be a Navajo in the traditional sense. That took him through Farmington, right past the Quikprint shop. He slammed on the brakes, backed, pulled into a parking place. He had three different bumper stickers made, timing the process. It took almost thirteen minutes and, yes, it was expensive. Then he drove faster than the law allowed, making up for the lost time.

He’d wanted a favorable ruling. He had imagined the scene – an old, old man recounting the history of the Hunger People from the clan’s day one, proving that these people had never joined with his own ancestors, never made common cause, never did any of those things that would make them linked in blood. Then he would tell Janet. And what would she say? So what? You think you can tell me I’m taboo. Like maybe I had AIDS. And I don’t meet your high Navajo standards. And then you can come back and say I passed your test. Well, screw you, old friend. Or maybe the ruling would be negative. Even a negative ruling was better than this ambiguity. With that he could at least make a clear-cut decision.

But the great conference at the Cayodito hogan had drifted away from anything specific into the misty world of Changing Woman, First Man and First Woman, Talking God, and the great galaxy of other yeis.

Frank Sam Nakai had heard Chee’s truck coming up the muddy road and was standing in the doorway of his hogan.

“I have been asking and I have found the man who will know about the Hunger People and your own clans,” his uncle had said. “He lives over by Crystal. We will go and listen to what he will tell us.”

The man who would know was named Barbone. Like Nakai he was a hataalii, and like Nakai he was called “Hosteen” in respect for his years and his wisdom. But, of course, when they turned off the pavement of Navajo Route 32 and jolted down the road past the old Crystal trading post and up the crooked tracks into the aspen grove where Barbone had built his hogan, they discovered that Hosteen Barbone was not at home. His daughter, who seemed to Chee to be about seventy-five, said he had gone to the place of Gracie Cayodito to decide what sort of ceremonial was needed to cure a Cayodito grandchild of an illness.

On the road again, eastward out of the Chuskas to Route 666, north to the Two Grey Hills turnoff, then back into the Chuskas on the road which led – when and if weather permitted – to the Toh-Ni Tsa forest fire lookout tower. A badly used Chevy Blazer and a pickup truck were parked at the Cayodito place. Gracie was there. So was Hosteen Barbone, looking old enough to have a daughter over seventy. Beside Barbone, against the south wall of the hogan, sat a woman who looked even older than Barbone. Old Woman Mustache. Chee had heard of her somewhere – had heard that she was the wise person of the Streams Come Together Clan.

About an hour into the ensuing discussion, Chee decided that Old Woman Mustache either was mute or had fallen asleep. Hosteen Barbone covered the genesis of the Hunger People, how the clan had formed and gotten its name during Naahondzibd, the “Fearing Time” when the American army had joined the Mexicans and Utes in the war against the Dineh, and the men were afraid to leave on a hunt because they might return to find their hogans burned, their wives slaughtered, and their children taken by the soldiers, to be sold in the slave market at Santa Fe.

“They say that’s when the Hunger People began. They say that Kit Carson came through there, came through about where Many Farms is now, with horse soldiers and some Utes. They killed the people they caught there, and took the horses, and burned up all the corn and piñon nuts and blankets, and gathered up the children to sell them in Santa Fe. My grandmother said they got a hundred and fifty dollars for her. A rancher way down the Rio Grande bought her and had her baptized but she ran away and got back to the Jemez Pueblo and they sent her back to where her family was but her family was all gone. They say that only one man in that camp had a gun and when he tried to fight the soldiers with it, it wouldn’t shoot. The soldiers killed that one and just a few people got away up into the mountains. And they found other people hiding there, mostly women and children. They say they were from all over. From other camps where the soldiers had come through and cut down the orchards and burned the food and stolen the horses. A lot of them starved or froze to death during that winter, but Carson never did capture them so they didn’t go on the Long Walk to Bosque Redondo. They say that when the Americans released the Dineh from that prison and they came back to Dine’ Bike’yah, these people had their own clan. They say that since they came from all over they couldn’t name them with the place they came from, so everybody called them the Hunger People.”

Hosteen Barbone had given them the beginnings of the Hunger People, as he had heard it. Now he would give them the rest of that clan’s history. And when that was finished, they would hear from Gracie Cayodito, and perhaps from Old Woman Mustache if she wasn’t asleep.

Chee had been raised among the traditionals, among the sheep camp and hogan people. He knew how to sit comfortably and be patient. If he was lucky, Barbone’s account would never, in any way, link the Hunger People with the clans of his own mother or father. And so he listened, trying to keep track of contacts and relationships between maternal clans, paternal clans, offshoot fragments of clans. The only bad news he heard seemed vague and ambiguous.

Barbone fell silent. The silence extended long enough to signal that his account was finished. He had talked about an hour, Chee thought, but he resisted the impulse to confirm this with a glance at his watch. Into the silence Old Woman Mustache spoke.

“Too much talk about those father’s clans,” she said in a voice that was very old but surprisingly clear. “Remember in the Fourth World when the women got tired of the men and went across the river and pleasured themselves. Remember what the Holy People taught us then. That men have their things to do, and women have their things to do, and one of the woman’s things is the family. Remember what they taught us then. The mother’s clan, the clan you’re born for, that’s the one that is important.”

Having said that, with long pauses for breathing between sentences, Old Woman Mustache closed her eyes and rested. Gracie Cayodito spoke next.

She began with the self-effacing “They say,” by which traditional Navajos pass along information without making any personal claim to it. In the case of Gracie Cayodito the form did not represent any self-doubts. She took them through the histories of Chee’s two clans. Since her sources of data considered the Bitter Water Dinee’ one of the original four formed by Changing Woman herself, she took them back to the mythic days when the spirits called Holy People still walked the Earth surface world with the humans they had formed. Gracie Cayodito covered this history with relative speed, but digressed often into the heresies being committed by the contemporary shamans who violated the old rules of ritualism, and, with hard looks at Jim Chee, related the horrors produced by violations of the incest taboo.

“People who have sex with their sisters,” she said, looking at Chee. “That causes craziness. That causes people to jump into the fire.”

But, alas, when she had finally finished, whether Janet Pete was indeed his sister remained unclear in Chee’s mind. What was crystal-clear was that Cayodito felt even more strongly than Hosteen Barbone did about adapting ceremonials as old as the dawn of time to the terminal years of the twentieth century.

Then Hosteen Frank Sam Nakai spoke – not long, but long enough to underline the important points.

First, nobody could tell for sure whether or not this daughter of the man from the Hunger People was a clan sister of this son of the Slow Talking People and the Bitter Water Dinee’, and second, the Beauty Way of the Navajo people was being undermined by young shamans who were too lazy to learn the rules the Holy People had taught, or too willing to do ceremonies the wrong way and thus adapt them to the world of the bilagaani.

Chee parked his muddy pickup in the police cars only area at the office and waited for the place to officially open at 8 A.M. He would check in with Leaphorn and then… But no. He’d forgotten. Leaphorn would be gone. Off on his great China trip. Gone for a month. Chee felt a twinge of guilt. He should have checked in with the lieutenant yesterday. Should have told him good-bye and gotten his final instructions. Leaphorn would. He’d probably want him to do something about the Jimmy Chester-Ed Zeck telephone call. He’d probably want to talk about how they could get some evidence against Chester that could be used in court. Probably want to bring in Dilly Streib. Maybe help set up an FBI sting operation.

He glanced at his watch. Couple of more minutes and Virginia would be there. If he’d guessed right about the lieutenant, there’d be an envelope awaiting him, full of instructions on what to do and how to do it. He allowed himself a final review of what last night’s session meant to him. Whether Janet was his clan sister, even vaguely, remained in doubt. But, but, but… There was no doubt at all that for Hosteen Barbone and Gracie Cayodito and, much worse, Frank Sam Nakai, his own Little Father, mere absence of proof was not good enough.

And how about Old Woman Mustache? When Frank Sam Nakai had finished his summation they had all sat in silence for a while, watching the fire burn down under the smoke hole. And then the old woman had spoken:

“You have wasted words,” she said. “Too much talk of men and the man’s clan. Nothing matters but the mother’s clan.”

But what the devil did that mean to him? Janet’s mother was a white. There was no mother’s clan. He climbed out of the truck, and slammed the door behind him.

Virginia looked no happier than he felt.

“Where have you been?” she demanded. “Lieutenant Leaphorn was looking everywhere for you.”

“Took my days off,” Chee said. “Did he leave anything for me?”

“Not with me,” she said, and glared at him.

Nor, to Chee’s surprise, was there a fat envelope in his in-basket. There was absolutely nothing in it. Leaphorn’s office door was closed, which wasn’t unusual. It was locked. Unusual, but understandable under the circumstances. He wouldn’t want to leave it open for a month.

Chee trotted downstairs, past Virginia’s now-vacant desk, and out to his car. This felt odd. With Leaphorn in China for a month he was totally on his own. Well, not quite. He probably should report to the chief, as the lieutenant did. But that could wait until he had a little time to think. To do that he’d go home. Maybe he’d even get a little sleep.

He pulled his truck out of the lot, stopping to let the northbound traffic pass. The third car looked like Leaphorn’s. And Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn was driving it.