“You know, at one time when my great-grandfather was young, Navajos lived in all these-hills.” He pointed to the hills and ridges south of the tracks where the white people had built their houses. He nodded at the arroyo cut by the river. “They had little farms along the river. When the railroaders came and the white people began to build their town, the Navajos had to move.” The old man laughed suddenly. He slapped his hands on his thighs. His laughter was easy, but Tayo could feel the tiny hairs along his spine spring up. This Betonie didn’t talk the way Tayo expected a medicine man to talk. He didn’t act like a medicine man at all.
“It strikes me funny,” the medicine man said, shaking his head, “people wondering why I live so close to this filthy town. But see, this hogan was here first. Built long before the white people ever came. It is that town down there which is out of place. Not this old medicine man.” He laughed again, and Tayo looked at Robert quickly to see what he thought of the old man; but Robert’s face was calm, without any mistrust or alarm. When old Betonie had finished talking, Robert stepped over to Tayo and touched his shoulder gently. “I guess I’ll go now,” he said softly.
Tayo watched him walk down the path from the old man’s place, and he could feel cold sweat between his fingers. His heart was pounding, and all he could think about was that if he started running right then, he could still catch up to Robert.
“Go ahead,” old Betonie said, “you can go. Most of the Navajos feel the same way about me. You won’t be the first one to run away.”
Tayo turned to look for Robert, but he was gone. He stared at the dry yellow grass by the old man’s feet. The sun’s heat was draining his strength away; there was no place to go now except back to the hospital in Los Angeles. They didn’t want him at Laguna the way he was.
All along there had been something familiar about the old man. Tayo turned around then to figure out what it was. He looked at his clothes: the old moccasins with splayed-out elkhide soles, the leather stained dark with mud and grease; the gray wool trousers were baggy and worn thin at the knees, and the old man’s elbows made brown points through the sleeves of the blue cotton work shirt. He looked at his face. The cheekbones were like the wings of a hawk soaring away from his broad nose; he wore a drooping thick mustache; the hairs were steel gray. Then Tayo looked at his eyes. They were hazel like his own. The medicine man nodded. “My grandmother was a remarkable Mexican with green eyes,” he said.
He bent down like the old man did when he passed through the low doorway. Currents of cool air streamed toward the door, and even before his eyes adjusted to the dimness of the room, he could smell its contents; a great variety of herb and root odors were almost hidden by the smell of mountain sage and something as ordinary as curry powder. Behind the smell of dried desert tea he smelled heavier objects: the salty cured smell of old hides sewn into boxes bound in brass; the odor of old newspapers and cardboard, their dust smelling of the years they had taken to decay.
The old man pointed to the back of the circular room. “The west side is built into the hill in the old-style way. Sand and dirt for a roof; just about halfway underground. You can feel it, can’t you?”
Tayo nodded. He was standing with his feet in the bright circle of sunlight below the center of the log ceiling open for smoke. The size of the room had not been lost in the clutter of boxes and trunks stacked almost to the ceiling beams.
Old Betonie pointed at a woolly brown goatskin on the floor below the sky hole. Tayo sat down, but he didn’t take his eyes off the cardboard boxes that filled the big room; the sides of some boxes were broken down, sagging over with old clothing and rags spilling out; others were jammed with the antennas of dry roots and reddish willow twigs tied in neat bundles with old cotton strings. The boxes were stacked crookedly, some stacks leaning into others, with only their opposing angles holding them steady. Inside the boxes without lids, the erect brown string handles of shopping bags poked out; piled to the tops of the WOOLWORTH bags were bouquets of dried sage and the brown leaves of mountain tobacco wrapped in swaths of silvery unspun wool.
He could see bundles of newspapers, their edges curled stiff and brown, barricading piles of telephone books with the years scattered among cities — St. Louis, Seattle, New York, Oakland — and he began to feel another dimension to the old man’s room. His heart beat faster, and he felt the blood draining from his legs. He knew the answer before he could shape the question. Light from the door worked paths through the thick bluish green glass of the Coke bottles; his eyes followed the light until he was dizzy and sick. He wanted to dismiss all of it as an old man’s rubbish, debris that had fallen out of the years, but the boxes and trunks, the bundles and stacks were plainly part of the pattern: they followed the concentric shadows of the room.
The old man smiled. His teeth were big and white. “Take it easy,” he said, “don’t try to see everything all at once.” He laughed. “We’ve been gathering these things for a long time — hundreds of years. She was doing it before I was born, and he was working before she came. And on and on back down in time.” He stopped, smiling. “Talking like this is just as bad, isn’t it? Too big to swallow all at once.”
Tayo nodded, but now his eyes were on the ceiling logs where pouches and bags dangled from wooden pegs and square-headed nails. Hard shrunken skin pouches and black leather purses trimmed with hammered silver buttons were things he could understand. They were a medicine man’s paraphernalia, laid beside the painted gourd rattles and deer-hoof clackers of the ceremony. But with this old man it did not end there; under the medicine bags and bundles of rawhide on the walls, he saw layers of old calendars, the sequences of years confused and lost as if occasionally the oldest calendars had fallen or been taken out from under the others and then had been replaced on top of the most recent years. A few showed January, as if the months on the underlying pages had no longer been turned or torn away.
Old Betonie waved his hands around the hogan. “And what do I make from all this?” He nodded, moving his head slowly up and down. “Maybe you smelled it when you came in.
“In the old days it was simple. A medicine person could get by without all these things. But nowadays. .” He let his voice trail off and nodded to let Tayo complete the thought for him.
Tayo studied the pictures and names on the calendars. He recognized names of stores in Phoenix and Albuquerque, but in recent years the old man had favored Santa Fe Railroad calendars that had Indian scenes painted on them — Navajos herding sheep, deer dancers at Cochiti, and little Pueblo children chasing burros. The chills on his neck followed his eyes: he recognized the pictures for the years 1939 and 1940. Josiah used to bring the calendars home every year from the Santa Fe depot; on the reservation these calendars were more common than Coca-Cola calendars. There was no reason to be startled. This old man had only done the same thing. He tried to shake off the feeling by talking.
“I remember those two,” he said.
“That gives me some place to start,” old Betonie said, lighting up the little brown cigarette he had rolled. “All these things have stories alive in them.” He pointed at the Santa Fe calendars. “I’m one of their best customers down there. I rode the train to Chicago in 1903.” His eyes were shining then, and he was looking directly into Tayo’s eyes. “I know,” he said proudly, “people are always surprised when I tell them the places I have traveled.” He pointed at the telephone books. “I brought back the books with all the names in them. Keeping track of things.” He stroked his mustache as if he were remembering things.