Nightway (3 page)

Before spring arrived, he had a sister. Hawk noticed, with interest, that she was different, but not in the same way he was. Her eyes were large and brown like his mother’s, but her hair was brown like the trunk of a cedar tree—not the glistening black of the crow. She was given the name Cedar Girl.

Hawk began to call his sister The-One-Who-Cries-at-Everything. She cried when she was hungry, when she was sleepy, when she heard a loud noise, when his mother picked her up, or when she laid her down.
Nothing and no one pleased her except Laughing Eyes. Initially, he suffered the pangs of rejection at the fuss his parents made over his new sister. His needs were of secondary importance to the demands of the baby. He was truly alone like the hawk, pushed out of the nest to fend for himself. But he could. Was he not nearly grown? Hadn’t he begun to wear a breech-cloth? Hadn’t he been initiated into the tribe? Hawk began to pity his sister because she was dependent on others.

Because his baby sister demanded so much of his mother’s time, Hawk had to assume more responsibility. His father still came two or three times a week, bringing presents and food, staying a few hours or for part of the night, but always leaving before dawn. So it fell on Hawk’s shoulders to take over the duties that would have belonged to his father if he lived with them all the time.

Thus, when his mother’s uncle became ill and it was divined that a Mountain Top Way had to be held to cure him, all relatives were required to contribute to the cost of the ceremony. While others agreed to furnish sheep to feed the hundreds—perhaps as many as a thousand—of guests who would come to witness the nine-night ceremony, Hawk agreed to provide the wood for the fires as his mother’s contribution, even though she was at his uncle’s hogan every day to help with the preparations.

When school was dismissed early, his first thought was how much wood he would be able to chop before dark. A little snow would not stop him. But it was more than a little snow that fell from the flint-gray clouds that darkened the sky. Two inches were on the ground and more flakes were falling when the school bus let him out more than two miles from his home. Hawk mentally filed away the information that the white teachers had correctly predicted this storm.

The flakes fell heavily and straight down. Before he reached the hogan, the wind caught up with the storm to blow the snow around. Visibility was reduced, but Hawk didn’t have to enter the hogan to know there was no fire warming the inside. No smoke curled from the chimney hole. Hawk trudged through the snow toward the door, assured that his mother and little sister had stayed at his uncle’s because of the storm.

As he passed the corral, the horse whickered. Hawk stopped still, staring through the screen of white at the sound. Inside the corral stood the chestnut horse, wearing its harness and collar. He searched again, but the buckboard wasn’t in the yard.

Turning to look in the direction that led to his uncle’s house, he was enveloped in a swirling storm of snow. He could see nothing, no movement except the falling snow. Turning again, Hawk ran to the corral. He didn’t bother to unharness the horse and put on the saddle. Hopping on bareback, he gathered the long reins and tied them short.

The chestnut horse did not want to go out in the storm. It took repeated proddings and a slap of the reins to make it leave the corral. Hawk pointed the horse in the direction of his uncle’s hogan, a route that the horse knew well.

Into the face of the howling wind, the horse plodded through the snow, which had begun to accumulate into drifts. Almost to his uncle’s hogan, Hawk found the buckboard in a dry wash with a broken axle. Taking the chance that he hadn’t passed his mother and sister, he rode on to his uncle’s hogan. Since she had been closer to it, it was logical to assume she had returned there.

But she hadn’t. Hawk stayed long enough to warm the numbness from his bones. His relatives tried to convince him that he didn’t have a hope of finding his mother and sister in this storm, but Hawk wouldn’t be
dissuaded from going out to search for them. In the absence of his father, he was responsible. And Hawk knew he was doing what his father would do in his place.

With a warm Pendleton blanket of his cousin’s, Hawk set out again. The storm was worse, the temperatures dropping, and the wind whipping it still lower. Pain lay like a cold bar across his forehead. Snow was drifting over the buckboard. Hawk almost didn’t see it.

The snow was deeper and the wind blew it into high drifts. The horse began to labor, plunging through belly-high snows. More than halfway home, the horse staggered to its knees. Hawk finally recognized the futility of going farther. Dismounting, he tied the reins to the harness with numbed fingers and turned the horse loose. Snow and ice were encrusted on its shaggy coat. On its own, the horse would turn its tail to the wind and gradually drift toward its home corral.

Seeking the shelter of a windbreak, Hawk found a tumble of snow-covered boulders and crouched behind it. He wrapped the blanket around him like a tent. It accomplished nothing to rail against the conditions imposed upon him. Indian-like, Hawk practiced the blind acceptance of the circumstances. This was a time to renew his strength from within, to ignore the cold, the wind, and snow raging around him. Surrendering his mind and body, he relaxed into a self-induced torpor where nothing existed but what was within.

Time passed without thoughts. Hawk didn’t change his huddling, yoga-like position inside the walls of his blanket-tent. The accumulation of snow on the blanket acted as insulation to keep out the freezing temperature.

An inner sense told him when the storm was over. Straightening, he shook off the weight of the snow on his blanket and drew it around his shoulders, crossing it
in front of him. The world was white and still, newborn and strange, the familiar landmarks hidden by a concealing mantle of snow. Gradually, his eyes unmasked the disguises the landmarks wore. Hawk started out unerringly in the direction of his home.

If he had survived the storm, then his mother and little sister could have, too. They might already be at the hogan, waiting and worrying about him. If they weren’t, he would have to resume his search.

Hawk had traveled no more than a hundred yards when he saw a patch of bright green against the snow. It was the same shade of bright green as the velveteen blouse that was his mother’s favorite. In a stumbling run, he plowed through the snow to reach the spot. When he stopped, he could see the outline of a human figure in the snow mound. The extra hump would be the cradleboard and his sister. There was no movement. Hawk stared for a long, silent moment, then hesitantly reached down and brushed aside the snow on the cradle. Tears were frozen on Cedar Girl’s cheeks.

He took one step backward, then a second. Quickly, he turned and ran, putting distance between himself and the bodies of his mother and sister. The cold tore at his lungs, forcing him to slow down. Without looking back, he trudged on toward the hogan.

Across the silence of the white world came the muffled thud of hoofbeats and the creak of saddle leather. Hawk lifted his gaze. He stopped at the sight of the horse and rider approaching at a lunging canter, puffs of white vapor coming from the nostrils of the horse. The rider was leading a second horse, the chestnut, still wearing its harness.

“Hawk!” His father’s shout prompted the boy to wave.

The horse grunted and snorted as it was reined to a stop, and the rider slipped out of the saddle to rush
forward and grasp the boy’s shoulders. Relief briefly overrode the concern in his expression.

“I found the horse. … Where is your mother? The baby?” Large, gloved hands dug through the blanket into his shoulders.

“They are gone.” It was a flat, unemotional statement.

“Gone? What do you mean—
gone
?” J. B. Faulkner demanded in a desperate kind of anger.

“They are gone—on the path that goes only one way.” Hawk returned the piercing gaze with a stoic acceptance of the fact.

“No! Dammit! I won’t let them be dead!” His voice was a raging cry. “You are going to take me to them!”

“No!” The boy recoiled in fear, trying to pull free of the powerful hands that held him.

“You are going to take me to them! Do you hear?” The command was reinforced by a brutal shake that snapped the boy’s head back.

He didn’t give Hawk a chance to refuse as he spun him around and dragged him along by the arm. Following the tracks in the snow, J. B. Faulkner began retracing the boy’s route. Frantically, he scanned the snow-covered ground ahead of them. There was an audible breath when he saw the footprints leading to a patch of green where the snow was disturbed to reveal the white-frosted face of the baby girl. He started running, pulling the boy along with him. Hawk lost his balance in the deep snow and fell. He was dragged a few feet on his knees before J. B. released the dead weight to go on alone.

The thick cushion of snow broke his fall. The blanket was forgotten and abandoned as Hawk pushed onto his knees. He was shivering, more from fear than from the cold. The terror built as he saw Laughing Eyes heaving the snow away from the bodies with mighty sweeps of
his gloved hands. Terrible sounds were coming from him—sounds of a crazed man.

“No!” Hawk screamed in panic when he saw Laughing Eyes lifting his mother’s body from its deathbed of snow.

Ice crystals of blood were frozen to her forehead. Hawk looked quickly away, avoiding the sight of her white-frosted face. His fear increased when his father began rubbing the rigid limbs. In a wretched and tortured voice, Laughing Eyes beseeched her to speak to him, calling her name over and over. When he pressed his mouth to the blue lips and tried to force his life into her empty shell, Hawk’s fear for his father was greater than his own.

“No!” He ran to his father’s kneeling figure and pulled frantically at his arm. “You must leave them! You must not look upon them! Please! Please!” He was almost sobbing. “Terrible things happen if you look upon the dead! Their ghosts will possess you! Come away from them!”

Some of his warning penetrated because his father turned to look at him. Stark horror held the boy in a paralyzing grip. His father’s face was contorted into a mask as frightening as the ones the
kachinas
wore.

“Let go of me!” The snarling voice came from his father’s mouth, but it didn’t belong to him.

Too stunned by the frightening face before him, Hawk never saw the arcing, backhanded swing until the very last second when it was too late to avoid it. Pain exploded in his right jaw and cheek. The force of the blow sent him reeling backward, but Hawk was unconscious before he crumpled to the snow.

He wasn’t aware of the arms that so gently picked him up, or of the gloved fingers that trembled over the vivid red mark covering almost half of his face; nor did
he hear the begging to be forgiven. He floated in a black void that nothing penetrated.

When his conscious mind finally surfaced, he was alone in the hogan. A fire was burning, radiating its heat to every corner. Pain throbbed in the right side of his face. Gingerly, he cupped his hand to the swollen flesh running from cheekbone to jaw. It hurt!

As he propped himself up on his elbows, the door opened. Hawk cringed instinctively from the tall, hulking frame. The action was not dictated by a fear of his father, but a fear of the ghosts that had possessed him. As he came closer to the light, Hawk saw that the furious look had gone from his eyes. But so had the laughter. Now his eyes were filled with a tortured sadness, and they avoided looking directly at Hawk.

“Are you hungry?” His father stood in front of the fire and warmed his hands, keeping his back to the boy. “Your cousin fixed some soup.”

The gruff voice was abrupt, carrying a hint of self-consciousness. But the announcement awakened Hawk’s senses to the aroma of food and the gnawing emptiness of his stomach. In a laborious movement, he rolled to his feet and walked to the kettle of soup. The right side of his face felt peculiarly heavy. With a tin mug drawn from the shelf wall of the hogan, he dipped out a cup of soup and carried it to the fire to drink.

His father was uneasy with him. Hawk could tell by the way his eyes kept sliding away without making contact with his. He tried sipping at the hot soup, but when he opened his mouth, the swollen skin on his cheek stretched and sent fiery splinters of pain through him. He winced, unable to conceal it.

“I never meant to hurt you, boy.” The husky voice was bitter with regret and remorse.

“You should not have looked on them. Bad things
happen,” Hawk repeated. “If the right things are not done, their ghosts will come.”

“I don’t believe in ghosts. There are no such things,” his father insisted with fierce determination. “How can you believe your mother would come back to harm you? You know how much she loved you.”

“A ghost is the bad part.” As he carefully took another sip of his soup, his downcast eyes watched his father’s hands clench into fists, a sign of anger and struggle for control.

“What do you … what do The People believe happens to a person when he dies?” His father rephrased the terse question.

“They go to a place in the black north.” Hawk didn’t like talking about the dead or what happened to them. Speaking about it was inviting ghosts to return. “To reach the place, the dead person must travel four days, and he is guided by a relative who died before. At the bottom of a tall cliff, there is an entrance that leads below the surface to the place. Before the dead can enter this place, those who guard the entrance will test him to be certain he is dead.”

His father’s eyes were tightly shut and his mouth clenched hard, the point of his chin trembling. When Hawk had finished his explanation, he heard the whispered words of pain his father unconsciously uttered.

“My God, what a terrible place!” His big chest heaved as he took a deep breath and slowly released it. His eyes opened to stare blankly at the fire. “That isn’t what the white man believes,” he said. “He believes that when a person like your mother dies, she goes to heaven. It’s a place in the sky where there is only beauty and happiness—no hunger, no cold, no pain. There, she will know a peace and contentment she could never find on this earth.”