Wild Penance

5

I left the BLM at noon, and the rest of the day was wide open. I didn’t want to go home, didn’t want to have to go back through the command post on the east rim of the gorge, didn’t want to have to go back across the bridge.

To pass the time, I decided to go visit my medicine teacher. I drove five miles north across Grand Mesa. At the Tanoah Falls Casino, I turned off the highway and headed in the direction of the mountains along a winding, narrow road through the tiny village of Cascada Azul, almost deserted now with ski season over. Tanoah Pueblo took a backseat in tourism to the larger Taos Pueblo, with its massive adobe architecture. The little walled village of Tanoah had its own ancient earthen apartment-like structures, but was smaller, off the beaten path, and less well preserved.

Anna Santana, an elder of the tribe, lived in a small adobe home outside the walls of the main part of the village. She had taken me under her wing at an art show just a few months before, at Christmastime. I helped her prevent a calamity when her display of handmade jewelry, dreamcatchers, and pottery almost collapsed. On that first day, moments after we met, she had asked me about my mother. When I told her that my mother had left when I was very young, the Pueblo woman had insisted that I call her “Momma Anna.” And she invited me to share the Christmas feast with her and her family at Tanoah Pueblo, and later, King’s Day and yet another Pueblo feast day. Soon I began coming to her house now and then just to pass time with her as she cooked or made pottery or performed any of the dozens of hardworking endeavors that filled her life. A month or so ago, Momma Anna had announced that she was my medicine teacher, and that she was called to teach me “Indun way.” However, I had no sense that any formal training had begun. At least not yet.

When I pulled up in front of her house, I noticed a plume of blue-gray smoke coming from the back, on the side nearest the acequia, the irrigation ditch that carried water from the rio to the tribe’s fields. A pack of mutts came to greet me, and I stopped to pet heads and scratch ears. I walked around the house and saw a small brown woman bent over, scraping live coals out onto the ground from the floor of the horno-a beehive-shaped outdoor adobe oven used for baking. Momma Anna straightened when she heard my footsteps. She turned, looked me up and down, and then gestured for me to come to her. “You come. We bake pies.”

On the table under the portal behind her house, four trays of folded and crimped, prune-filled pastry pockets huddled under cotton dish towels. These little triangle-shaped pies were a favorite of the Tanoah, and Momma Anna made some of the best I had tasted. Her dough was always crisp and flaky; the filling, which she made from wild plums that grew along the acequia, was chewy, tart, and sticky, never too sweet. I brought the trays over, and we shoved them into the horno, then closed the door almost completely, leaving just enough of an opening so that the heat inside would not burn the pies.

Anna Santana drew up straight after the door was in place and again looked me up and down. “Today we start,” she said. With the shovel she had used to remove the live coals from the horno, she scooped up a burning ember and carried it carefully before her as she made for the back door.

Inside her house, Momma Anna laid the shovel with the glowing coal in its blade on top of the woodstove. She took a pinch of cedar tips from a pottery jar and sprinkled the green buds over the red coal. The cedar began to smudge at once. Momma Anna lifted the shovel handle in one hand, and in the other took up a hand broom fashioned from foot-long stems of ricegrass bound with thread into a short tube shape, the fibers spread on one end for sweeping. She used the broom to fan the smoke over me in a ritual of cleansing and preparation. As she bathed me with the smoke, she mumbled a prayer in Tiwa.

After the prayer, she returned the shovel to the top of the woodstove and left the room without speaking. I stood where I was, inhaling the clean, sharp scent of the purifying smoke. Momma Anna returned with a folded blanket, atop which rested a large elk hide bag. She spread the colorful Pendleton on the floor of her living room in front of the sofa. “Sit down.”

I sat cross-legged on the blanket, and so did she, placing the bag beside her. She reached inside and brought out a small drum made in the Pueblo tradition-from a hollowed-out log covered at both ends with stretched and laced rawhide. This drum was no bigger than six inches in diameter, and not as tall. Next, she brought out the beater-a peeled aspen stick, wrapped on one end with a wad of padding covered with deer hide and tied with sinew. Once more, my medicine teacher reached into the bag, and she drew out a small hand-sewn deerskin pouch, tied with a leather thong. When she had arranged these items between us on the blanket, she looked at me and smiled. She picked up the drum and began beating on it in a steady rhythm. After a minute or two of drumming, she set the instrument down and reached for the pouch. “Hold out hand,” she said.

I extended my palm and she took it with one hand and, with her other hand, turned the pouch upside down and shook it. I cupped my fingers to catch the smooth stones that fell from the bag. I looked down to see what I had. Seven or eight small flat ovals of river rock rested in my palm.

“Choose,” Momma Anna said.

I used my finger to sort through the lot and selected one of the smallest, a smooth black disc. “I like this one best.”

She snorted. “Maybe you not like best, next other time. Best teacher not always one you like. That ancestor,” she said, pointing to the stone in my hand, “got big lesson for you.” She snatched up the other stones and put them back in the pouch, tied it with the thong, and returned it to the elk hide bag. She straightened her back, her legs folded in front of her, and she put out her hand. “Now we see about that lesson. Let me see Old One.”

I handed her the stone.

She closed her fingers around it and then held her fist against her chest. She looked at me and took a deep breath, as if she were drawing air through the stone. Time passed, but she did not breathe out. Her eyes remained fixed on my face. Then she let out a blast of air and extended her open palm to me. “Now, you.”

I took the stone and did as Momma Anna had done, holding it to my chest and watching her as I did so. I drew in air and held it.

Momma Anna’s eyes did not move. They were like the stone-shiny and black and smooth.

I felt my chest tightening, wanting to release the air, but I held on for as long as I could. Finally, I let my breath out.

Momma Anna picked up the beater and began playing her drum again. When she stopped, she said, “Now, we got pies ready.”

We removed the trays full of perfectly browned pies from the horno, and the delicious smell of the warm fruit and the crisp pastry reminded me that I hadn’t eaten that day. Momma Anna took one of the cotton dish towels she had used to cover the pies before baking and put two of the little tarts inside. She tied the corners of the cloth, creating a hobo pouch. She handed this to me, and when I took it the contents felt warm in my hand. “You need forgiveness,” she said.

My mouth came open. “What?”

She frowned. One thing my medicine teacher had taught me was that the Tiwa considered it rude to ask questions. Even one-word questions. She softened her expression. “Ask. You ask forgiveness, everyone you care about.”

“But… I don’t know what I’ve done. I don’t know what to ask forgiveness for.”

“You are human being. All people need forgiveness.”

“But, I mean-”

“You go now,” she said, picking up my free hand and placing it over my cloth bundle and patting it, like one might pat the hand of a child. “Go ask forgiveness. You need that. You take Old One with you.”

I had tucked the stone in the pocket of my jeans when we had gotten up from the blanket. Now, I reached my fingers in the pocket and started to take it out.

“No!” Momma Anna said. “Keep him there.” She reached out and took me by the shoulder and started shepherding me to the corner of the house so I could go back around front.

“But Momma Anna,” I protested, “I’m confused. I don’t understand.”

She stopped and let out a blast of air. “This your lesson. When you do your lesson, then you understand. Not this time, but next other time when lesson finish. Now go. Do.”