People of the Silence (3 page)

“Yes, you know I will. Go on,” Slumber said, and waved a transparent old hand, smiling. “I just want to sit for a while and listen.”

Maggie stroked her grandmother’s hair again and turned away.

*   *   *

Slumber watched her granddaughter trot toward the trail that led down to the parking lot and sighed.
I’m almost done in. My soul’s hanging by a spiderweb, floating somewhere high above my body.

That pleased Slumber. She needed to escape. The pain was getting too bad. Every square inch of her old body hurt. Oh, the doctor had given her all kinds of pills to take, but she’d tucked them into a paper bag and tossed them in the trash. When the time came, Slumber Walking Hawk would stand up, greet whichever ancestor came to get her, and climb into the skyworld with a clear mind and an open heart.

She straightened her ankle-length purple cotton dress around her. The color looked startling against the fine red stones that formed the wall.

Two people came through the front entry with Magpie. Both had their brows furrowed, as if ready for a fight, and they spoke in dark tones. That tall man, though, he had some
Power.
Slumber could see it wavering about him like a faint blue glow. With the right teacher he could really be something. Too bad most Whites couldn’t spot it.

Slumber gazed southward across the rugged canyon. A wavering veil of rain was sweeping northward. The damp earth smelled like perfume. She inhaled and held the blessing breath in her lungs while she silently thanked the
Shiwana
for the shower. The
Shiwana
were the spirits of the dead who’d climbed into the heavens and become cloud beings. The Hopi called them
Katchinas,
the Zuni called them
Koko,
the Tewa knew them as the
Okhua,
but most Whites used the word
katchina,
because of the dolls the Navajo made and sold in all the grocery and gun stores.

The storm edged toward the ruins, and Slumber tipped her face up, letting the first big drops splat on her forehead. A soft patter fell on the ancient walls, and on the tan dust of the plaza. Rain was life itself in the desert. As wind gusted through the ruins, Slumber’s short gray hair whipped about, slapping her deeply wrinkled cheeks and forehead, tangling with her stubby eyelashes. Slumber turned her head away and let the wind gust by.

The sweet lilting notes of a wooden flute drifted through the ruins. Slumber cocked her head and looked around. Did anyone else hear? She looked straight at the tall blond-haired man. He had stopped talking—his mouth was still open. But he shook his head slightly, as though denying what his soul heard because his ears hadn’t, and he went back to waving his hands. Slumber let her eyes trace the half-moon shape of the ruins, searching for the musician.

Magpie led the two people to the center of the plaza and stopped to talk, saying, “I understand your point, Kyle. I just don’t agree. The regional tribes have been using this canyon for religious rituals for centuries. Our proposed plan only gives that fact official recognition. We—”

“You’re planning on closing the park for a month, Maggie!” Kyle propped his hands on his bony hips. He wore khaki shorts and a white T-shirt. Sunglasses shielded his eyes. His blond hair ruffled in the wind.

Slumber squinted at his legs.
Roadrunner skinny and hairy as a bear.
If she had legs like that, she’d keep them covered up so nobody’d gawk.

“Just who funded that plan of yours?” the woman hiker demanded to know. “Taxpayers! People like me who’ve been coming to this park in June for twenty years! It’s White re-creationists you’re trying to keep out! That’s racism!”

“Easy, Marisa. That’s out of line,” Kyle admonished.

Magpie bowed her head and seemed to be collecting her thoughts. Tall and thin, with rich brown eyes and short black hair, she wore an olive uniform. Her pants were perfect, the crease like a knife edge. A black leather belt tooled in basket-weave snugged her hips. The badge over her left breast gleamed. A government patch adorned her left shoulder. Slumber couldn’t read it from here, but she knew it for a park patch, telling the tourists that her granddaughter worked here, just in case they wanted to complain about something, or ask directions, maybe quiz her one more time on what “Anasazi” meant.

Slumber smiled. She’d heard that question at least a hundred times:
“Is it Ancient Ones or Ancient Enemy?”
She always gave the same answer, “You got me. If you ever find out, let me know.” Her own people, the Keres, claimed to be the descendants of the people who’d lived in this canyon a thousand years ago, but they’d never heard the word “Anasazi” until the Whites starting using it.

“Kyle,” Magpie said, “the park administration isn’t planning to close the park. They’re asking visitors to voluntarily avoid certain holy places around the summer solstice, that’s all. Many Puebloan peoples come here to perform healing, renewal, and purification rituals. The tribes believe this canyon has spiritual power. I know that may be hard for you to understand, but—”

“No, Maggie.” He shook his head. The dark lenses of his sunglasses flashed. “It’s not hard at all.
I
feel the spiritual power here. That’s why
I
come.”

Though her granddaughter’s real name was Magpie, she’d started calling herself Maggie when she’d gotten her first government job, Maggie Walking Hawk Taylor. That was all right with Slumber. So long as it made Magpie happy—and so long as she didn’t expect Slumber to call her that.

“What does ‘voluntary’ mean?” the woman asked. “Will we be punished if we don’t avoid those places?”

“No, of course not, Ms. Fenton. We are just hoping that you will respect the sanctity and privacy of the native peoples.”

Ms. Fenton looked all business. She wore her long graying brown hair in a neat bun. The style accented the flat planes of her round face and made her blue eyes seem huge. Her tan jacket and pants hugged all the right curves. Of course, she probably never had a chance to get fat, not with hiking all the time.

“This is a bad plan, Maggie,” Kyle continued. “Surely you must see that. Those holy places are holy to the people in our club, too, and this is
public
land.”

Magpie spread her hands in a pleading gesture. “This isn’t an easy issue, Kyle. In the old days, there weren’t so many conflicts. But as the number of tourists has increased, it’s become almost impossible for the tribes to hold ceremonials without forty flashbulbs going off a minute. Do you see what I’m saying?”

“Yes, of course, and that’s wrong, but the solution isn’t to ban Whites, Blacks, Hispanics, and Orientals from those places. There must be another solution, Maggie. Let’s work together to find it.”

Magpie shifted uneasily. “Let me try to explain something about Native American religions—and I’m not sure I can. I don’t think there’s a similar concept in White culture. You see, religious sites aren’t just pieces of land:
they’re sacred space.
They include the underworlds below, the surface of the land, and the skyworlds above. Some tribes believe there are openings at those places which lead between the worlds. They’re considered very dangerous. The uninitiated have been known to fall through those holes and be eaten by the monsters that inhabit those realms. Because of that—”

“This is getting pretty wild.” Ms. Fenton rolled her eyes. “Monsters? Come on.”

“I’m saying that some tribes have such beliefs,” Magpie continued. “Because of that, knowledge of the religious site is often considered sacred in and of itself, and reserved only for the holy people of the tribe. Talking about those places with outsiders, or having outsiders set foot on them, can so profane the site that it actually loses its sacredness. The
Power
goes away, Kyle. The openings close up and never reopen. Please try to underst—”

“You expect me to understand,” he cut her off, “but you refuse to see that it’s just as important to me to be here during the solstice! This canyon
rings
with power at that time. Listen, Maggie, I work an eight-to-five job in Albuquerque. By the time I take my summer vacation, I’m exhausted, mentally, physically, and spiritually. I come out here to touch the sacred, and to find myself. You and—” He waved a hand in Slumber’s general direction, and his gaze accidentally brushed Slumber’s. For several moments, he stood as if frozen. Magpie smiled. Finally, he tugged his eyes away and haltingly continued, “You—you want to deny me the right to worship in a place that my own tax dollars, and the tax dollars of every other American, go to maintain. We
pay
for the right to come here.”

Slumber braced a hand on the ancient wall and eased to her feet. Her legs shook. That old Flute Player was coming closer, and she wanted to go out and meet him. The music floated around her like butterfly wings, soft and playful.

Slumber hobbled out into the plaza, past a tall young man and a moon-faced young woman. Dressed in beautiful red-and-black knee-length shirts, they knelt prodding a fire to life. They smiled at each other, and laughed gaily, and Slumber chuckled. New love was always filled with dreams. The aroma of burning cedar wafted on the wind.

Slumber took a few more steps and stopped. Most of her tribe knew that she saw into other worlds; that’s why they called her “She Who Haunts the Dead.” Half-seen people walked around her all the time, making pots, weaving cotton, knapping out stone tools. Whether Slumber lived in their long-gone world, or whether they’d stepped into hers, here and now, she didn’t know. Usually they just passed each other. Sometimes very powerful holy people would gasp and stare at Slumber, as if seeing her through a thick mist—a few even tried to speak with her. But that never worked. She couldn’t understand their tongue, and they couldn’t understand hers.

Magpie said, “Only a century ago, the federal government in this country was banning Native American religions. They said that the First Amendment guarantee of the freedom of religion didn’t apply to Indians. That’s what Wounded Knee was all about. The people were Ghost Dancing and they’d been told it was against the law. The soldiers shot down over a hundred men, women, and little children.”

“I think,” Ms. Fenton pointed out with exaggerated politeness, “there was more to it than that.”

“Yes.” Magpie nodded. “There was. My point is this: in 1978 Congress passed Public Law 95–341, the American Indian Religious Freedom Act. That law recognized past injustices and guaranteed that it would be the policy of the United States from then on to protect and preserve American Indians’ inherent right to believe, express, and exercise their traditional religions—especially if native sacred sites were on public lands. And
that
is what our new park plan is attempting to do.”

“Does that same law give the federal government the right to ‘create’ Indian sacred sites?” Ms. Fenton asked. “Because that’s what you’re doing every time you dig up some old burial and replant it here in the canyon. How many bodies did you rebury last year? How many more places are you planning on keeping me out of?”

“We reinterred one burial last year. Just one.” Magpie folded her arms over her chest. “The burial was discovered in the process of a highway-widening project, down south near Gila Cliff Dwellings. It was obviously an Anasazi man, buried beneath a slab of rock. His clothing and jewelry were unmistakable. The tribes asked that we take him. We agreed because—”

“Because the more religious sites you have in the park, the more money you need to manage them, and the more land you can close off. Isn’t that right? All of this is a ploy for more taxpayer dollars?”

Magpie threw up her hands. “I knew this was going to be a difficult discussion. Perhaps we should just table this for now, and let our tempers cool down.”

Ms. Fenton sidled closer to Magpie. Her blue eyes gleamed with malice. “If you authorize Indians to practice their religion at this federally funded site, you will be violating the ‘separation of church and state’ clause. My kids can’t pray in school, but Indians can close down sections of the park to perform sacred rituals? Come on! What are you trying to do? Establish one official religion for the national parks in America? Indian religion?”

“No, no, we—”

“I demand equal treatment! I want a section of the park set aside for my private religious usage during the month of June. And I don’t want any ‘outsiders’ around bothering me. I need absolute privacy to perform my rituals—”

“Does that mean,” Magpie said with a weary smile, “that I can’t bring my flash attachment to photograph you while you meditate in the nude?”

Ms. Fenton’s expression tightened, but Kyle actually chuckled.

“Hey,” Kyle said. He held up his hands as if in surrender. “I think Maggie’s right. Why don’t we call it a day? We can talk more when we’ve all had a chance to…”

As Slumber rounded a corner in the gigantic pueblo, their voices faded. She’d had a dream last night that told her to follow this trail today. It wound between walls and around kivas. Slumber stopped when she reached the glass door. Pressing her nose against the pane, she looked inside. Ancient paintings adorned the wall. She’d first seen them many years ago. Slumber had stood with her mouth open, counting the beautiful green and blue diamonds that zigzagged over the white plaster. There’d been people sitting inside, a mother and daughter; they’d laughed and talked while Slumber gaped. No one sat inside today, but Slumber could see half-transparent belongings, willow twig sitting mats, black-and-white pots, rows of baskets. The ghosts must be out tending to chores.

Slumber started to walk away, but saw that something blue and shiny stuck out of the dirt at her feet. She bent over to look at it, prodded it with her finger, then smoothed the sand away. A magnificent turquoise knife emerged, broken in half. Slumber picked up the pieces and straightened to examine the stunning workmanship. No one in this day and age could work turquoise like this, it took a master—

“I’ve been waiting for you.”

Slumber looked up. Like many men she’d seen here in the past, he dressed in ancient clothing, black cloth decorated with white spirals. A turquoise pendant, in the shape of a wolf, hung around his throat. He held a flute in his left hand and seemed to be looking directly at her.