“I’ve been thinking,” she said, wiping her eyes on the edge of her apron, “all this time, while I was sitting in my chair. Those white doctors haven’t helped you at all. Maybe we had better send for someone else.”
When Auntie got back from the store, old Grandma told her, “That boy needs a medicine man. Otherwise, he will have to go away. Look at him.” Auntie was standing with a bag full of groceries in her arms. She set the bag down on the table and took off her coat and bandanna; she looked at Tayo. She had a way she looked when she saw trouble; she frowned, getting her answer ready for the old lady.
“Oh, I don’t know, Mama. You know how they are. You know what people will say if we ask for a medicine man to help him. Someone will say it’s not right. They’ll say, ‘Don’t do it. He’s not full blood anyway.’” She hung up her coat and draped the scarf on top of it.
“It will start all over again. All that gossip about Josiah and about Little Sister. Girls around here have babies by white men all the time now, and nobody says anything. Men run around with Mexicans and even worse, and nothing is ever said. But just let it happen with our family—” Old Grandma interrupted her the way she always did whenever Auntie got started on that subject.
“He’s my grandson. If I send for old Ku’oosh, he’ll come. Let them talk if they want to. Why do you care what they say? Let them talk. By planting time they’ll forget.” Old Grandma stood up straight when she said this and stared at Auntie with milky cataract eyes.
“You know what the Army doctor said: ‘No Indian medicine.’ Old Ku’oosh will bring his bag of weeds and dust. The doctor won’t like it.” But her tone of voice was one of temporary defeat, and she was already thinking ahead to some possible satisfaction later on, when something went wrong and it could be traced back to this decision. Like the night she tried to tell them not to keep the little boy for Sis any more; by then she was even running around with colored men, and she was always drunk. She came that night to leave the little boy with them. They could have refused then. They could have told her then not to come around any more. But they didn’t listen to her then either; later on though, they saw, and she used to say to them, “See, I tried to tell you.” But they didn’t care. Her brother, Josiah, and her mother. They didn’t care what the people were saying about their family, or that the village officers had a meeting one time and talked about running Sis off the reservation for good.
Old Grandma pulled the chair from the foot of the bed, and the old man sat down. He nodded at Tayo but didn’t say anything; Tayo didn’t understand what he was waiting for until he saw old Grandma wearing her coat and wool scarf, waiting while Auntie put on her coat. They left, and old Ku’oosh waited until the voices of the women could no longer be heard before he moved the chair closer to the bed. He smelled like mutton tallow and mountain sagebrush. He spoke softly, using the old dialect full of sentences that were involuted with explanations of their own origins, as if nothing the old man said were his own but all had been said before and he was only there to repeat it. Tayo had to strain to catch the meaning, dense with place names he had never heard. His language was childish, interspersed with English words, and he could feel shame tightening in his throat; but then he heard the old man describe the cave, a deep lava cave northeast of Laguna where bats flew out on summer evenings. He pushed himself up against the pillows and felt the iron bed frame against his back. He knew this cave. The rattlesnakes liked to lie there in the early spring, when the days were still cool and the sun warmed the black lava rock first; the snakes went there to restore life to themselves. The old man gestured to the northeast, and Tayo turned his head that way and remembered the wide round hole, so deep that even lying on his belly beside Rocky, he had never been able to see bottom. He remembered the small rocks they had nudged over the edge and how they had listened for some sound when the rocks hit bottom. But the cave was deeper than the sound. Auntie told them she would whip them if they didn’t stay away from that place, because there were snakes around there and they might fall in. But they went anyway, on summer nights after supper, when the crickets smelled the coolness and started singing. They were careful of the snakes that came out hunting after sundown, and they sneaked up to the cave very quietly and waited for the bats to fly out. He nodded to the old man because he knew this place. People said back in the old days they took the scalps and threw them down there. Tayo knew what the old man had come for.
Ku’oosh continued slowly, in a soft chanting voice, saying, “Maybe you don’t know some of these things,” vaguely acknowledging the distant circumstance of an absent white father. He called Josiah by his Indian name and said, “If he had known then maybe he could have told you before you went to the white people’s big war.” He hesitated then and looked at Tayo’s eyes.
“But you know, grandson, this world is fragile.”
The word he chose to express “fragile” was filled with the intricacies of a continuing process, and with a strength inherent in spider webs woven across paths through sand hills where early in the morning the sun becomes entangled in each filament of web. It took a long time to explain the fragility and intricacy because no word exists alone, and the reason for choosing each word had to be explained with a story about why it must be said this certain way. That was the responsibility that went with being human, old Ku’oosh said, the story behind each word must be told so there could be no mistake in the meaning of what had been said; and this demanded great patience and love. More than an hour went by before Ku’oosh asked him.
“You were with the others,” he said, “the ones who went to the white people’s war?”
Tayo nodded.
“There is something they have sent me to ask you. Something maybe you need, now that you are home.”
Tayo was listening to the wind outside; late in the afternoon it would begin to die down.
“You understand, don’t you? It is important to all of us. Not only for your sake, but for this fragile world.”
He didn’t know how to explain what had happened. He did not know how to tell him that he had not killed any enemy or that he did not think that he had. But that he had done things far worse, and the effects were everywhere in the cloudless sky, on the dry brown hills, shrinking skin and hide taut over sharp bone. The old man was waiting for him to answer.
Tayo reached down for the slop jar and pulled it closer.
“I’m sick,” he said, turning away from the old man to vomit. “I’m sick, but I never killed any enemy. I never even touched them.” He was shivering and sweating when he sat up.
“Maybe you could help me anyway. Do something for me, the way you did for the others who came back. Because what if I didn’t know I killed one?”
But the old man shook his head slowly and made a low humming sound in his throat. In the old way of warfare, you couldn’t kill another human being in battle without knowing it, without seeing the result, because even a wounded deer that got up and ran again left great clots of lung blood or spilled guts on the ground. That way the hunter knew it would die. Human beings were no different. But the old man would not have believed white warfare — killing across great distances without knowing who or how many had died. It was all too alien to comprehend, the mortars and big guns; and even if he could have taken the old man to see the target areas, even if he could have led him through the fallen jungle trees and muddy craters of torn earth to show him the dead, the old man would not have believed anything so monstrous. Ku’oosh would have looked at the dismembered corpses and the atomic heat-flash outlines, where human bodies had evaporated, and the old man would have said something close and terrible had killed these people. Not even oldtime witches killed like that.