The Turquoise Ledge: A Memoir Read online

  The Turquoise Ledge

  ALSO BY LESLIE MARMON SILKO

  Gardens in the Dunes (novel)

  Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit (essays)

  Sacred Water (autobiography)

  Almanac of the Dead (novel)

  Storyteller (short stories)

  Ceremony (novel)

  Laguna Woman (verse)

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in 2010 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Copyright © Leslie Marmon Silko, 2010

  All rights reserved

  Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint “Bee! I’m expecting you!” from The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Thomas H. Johnson, ed., Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Silko, Leslie, 1948–

  The turquoise ledge / Leslie Marmon Silko.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-46458-8

  1. Silko, Leslie, 1948–2. Women authors—20th century—Biography. 3. Authors, American—20th century—Biography. I. Title.

  PS3569.I44Z46 2010

  813'.54 dc22

  [B]

  2010012128

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrightable materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.

  To Mei Berssenbrugge,

  and to Linda Niemann,

  wonderful writers and much-loved friends;

  and to Bill Orzen—

  Old flames burn brightest.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Many thanks to Simon J. Ortiz, great poet and guest editor, and to all the people at The Kenyon Review for the lovely color images of Lord Chapulin and the story of his portrait in the special issue devoted to work by North American Indigenous Authors, Winter 2010.

  Mil gracias to the Matias family, Teresa, Alfonso, and their sons, and to the wonderful staff at Teresa’s Mosaic Cafe who fed me while I worked on this book. Their red chile chicken enchiladas and “cadillac” margaritas were essential to the writing of this book.

  CONTENTS

  PREFACE

  PART ONE

  Ancestors

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  PART TWO

  Rattlesnakes

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  PART THREE

  Star Beings

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  PART FOUR

  Turquoise

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44

  CHAPTER 45

  CHAPTER 46

  CHAPTER 47

  CHAPTER 48

  PART FIVE

  Lord Chapulin

  CHAPTER 49

  CHAPTER 50

  CHAPTER 51

  CHAPTER 52

  CHAPTER 53

  CHAPTER 54

  CHAPTER 55

  CHAPTER 56

  CHAPTER 57

  CHAPTER 58

  CHAPTER 59

  CHAPTER 60

  The Turquoise Ledge

  PREFACE

  I was born in 1948, the year of the supernova in the Mixed Spiral galaxy. My friend Joy Harjo, poet and astrologer, charted a triple triune for the afternoon of March 5, 1948 in Albuquerque, but dark planets rule my First House.

  1948 is the Year of the Rat. We rats seldom make lasting friendships. We let the correspondence lapse and don’t return phone calls.

  A great deal of what I call “memories” are bits and pieces I recall vividly; but the process we call “memory,” even recent memory, involves imagination. We learn to ignore the discrepancies between our memory of an event and a sister’s memory. We can’t be certain of anything.

  Fortunately my subconscious remembers everything I need. Whatever I can’t recall, later comes back to me as I write fiction. I make myself a fictional character so I can write about myself. Only a few proper names are included because it wasn’t my intention to write about others but instead to construct a self-portrait.

  PART ONE

  Ancestors

  CHAPTER 1

  My friend Bill Orzen taught me to speed walk on flat ground in town, but I prefer the hills to the city, so I adapted the speed walk to the steep rough terrain. The walks took me back into the Tucson Mountains to the old trails where I rode my horses thirty years ago when I first moved here. The trails are narrow footpaths made by the ancient tribal people who lived in the Tucson Mountains for thousands of years; later on prospectors used the old trails and made new trails to their mining claims.

  The trail I took on my walks passed the Thunderbird and Gila Monster mines—old diggings—they were never actual mines—the former is a shallow cave in the hillside and the other is a twenty foot vertical shaft where two big white barn owls live and once emerged as I rode by on horseback�
�truly startling and astonishing.

  On foot I can see the ant palaces, some in solid rock, others with starburst circles of stones they’ve mined and somehow moved up from below. The star pattern reminded me of the Star Being images incised into sandstone thousands of years ago.

  Eventually the trail descends and crosses the big arroyo and continues; but here I turn and follow the big arroyo back home. The sandy bottom of the arroyo is criss-crossed with bird and animal tracks that make the trail that humans have used for thousands of years. In rough steep terrain arroyos may provide the only access to an area so the arroyos are “rights of way” for wildlife and humans on foot.

  At first I didn’t pay much attention to the stones in the arroyo because I was focused on my walking—I was new to the notion of a speed walk through the desert. In the arroyo the deep drifts of fine white sand had a gravity of their own that sucked my feet down. So in those early months of learning how to walk over rough desert terrain at a fast pace I had all I could do to keep moving. I wasn’t thinking about rocks in the arroyo.

  I learned not to lift my feet in and out of the deep sand but instead to slide my feet through the top layer of sand very rapidly, to shuffle them back and forth so they wouldn’t have a chance to sink farther into the deep sand.

  Slowly it got easier and I started to notice the pebbles and rocks in the fine white sand, and the animal tracks and signs of coyote and bobcat in the arroyo. I began to find small rocks and pebbles streaked with turquoise. Over the years I’d picked up some of these turquoise rocks but I wasn’t as interested in the stones as I am now. I needed almost daily contact with the turquoise rocks on my walks to develop my interest.

  Turquoise doesn’t originate deep in the Earth as many precious minerals and gems do. It forms when certain chemical reactions take place during the weathering of surface minerals. Water is a necessary component of the formation of turquoise—no wonder indigenous people of the deserts connected turquoise with water and rain—it wasn’t just the color of blue or green—turquoise meant water had been there.

  The surface minerals necessary for the formation of turquoise are: Copper, aluminum and phosphates.

  Turquoise is a hydrous hydrate of copper.

  Hydrate of copper indicates water in the latticework of the turquoise molecule.

  Iron can substitute for aluminum and results in a color variation toward green.

  In my research I learned the turquoise stones I’d found were technically not turquoise but chrysocolla which is a minor copper ore, a hydrated copper silicate restricted to a shallow depth of less than twenty meters. Volcanic disturbance is required to make the cracks and fissures that allow water to reach the aluminum and iron ores in feldspars. Turquoise, malachite and chrysocolla are often found with one another so they all were called “turquoise” in the old days. Some turquoise was harder and shinier while some was chalky and soft. “Chalky turquoise” was the term for chrysocolla. It is not as easy as one might think to tell the difference between the two without chemical analysis in a laboratory.

  I prefer the lovely sound of the word “turquoise” and even “malachite” to the sound of “chrysocolla.” Chrysocolla sounds like the name of a soft drink—“Chrissy Cola.” Turquoise comes from the sixteenth century French word for “Turkish.”

  So I will use the word “turquoise.”

  After a walk I would make a few notes about what I’d seen and where. The next time I walked I wouldn’t be able to locate any of the places I’d noted on the earlier walk. The ant palaces I’d seen the previous day would have vanished.

  If gravity is distributed in this Universe unevenly, then there are places here on Earth where the gravity is weaker or stronger, where even light may speed up or slow down. At a certain walking speed, my eyes received light images from a parallel plane. Parallel planes or worlds may be visible briefly at certain points in this world from time to time. Thus the discrepancies between my recollections and notes immediately after a walk and what I actually find when I attempt to locate these places again.

  The idea was that the exercise and open air would help release my mind into a less self-conscious state where I could better perceive the delicacy of the light and the dawn moisture in the breeze. How sweet the air smells and how luxurious it feels to move through this yellow dawn light. The idea of the fast pace was a cardiovascular workout, but also the pace of the walks helped me edit the experience of the walks to the essentials.

  As I walked along, I began to imagine a great ledge of turquoise temporarily buried under the sand and rocks. To find so many pieces of turquoise in the millions of tons of arroyo sand pebbles and rocks meant the turquoise ledge must be large. Or is there more than one ledge of turquoise?

  The distribution of the pieces of the turquoise ledge may reveal its location to be somewhere below the place where the main road crosses the big arroyo. I don’t think the ledge occurs higher in the Tucson Mountains.

  My speculations and guesses proved to be wrong. I walked up the arroyo higher into the mountains far above the main road crossing and I found pieces of rock with turquoise streaks. I even found a small turquoise rock near the place the cottonwood used to grow higher in the mountains.

  CHAPTER 2

  When I was twelve, Great Grandma A’mooh’s baby brother, Robert Anaya, gave me a ring of oval green and brown turquoise in an old Navajo silver setting. He was blind by then and he used to cry from happiness as he embraced us children. We always stopped at his house in Paguate on our way deer hunting so he could bless us, and he prayed for us, for our safety and success as we hunted. I cherished this ring from Uncle Robert Anaya, and I wore it every day.

  When I was fourteen or fifteen, I was training a quarter horse filly. Every day after school I went to her corral to work with her so the saddle blankets and the saddle didn’t frighten her. I noticed the stone in the ring was a bit loose and I knew I should take it off as a precaution, but one day while I was working with the filly, the stone fell out in the deep dirt of the corral. The silver setting and ring remained on my finger. I searched and searched the dirt in the corral but never found the green turquoise stone.

  Recently I recalled some special quality in a small rectangular piece of turquoise I’d found awhile back. I looked around my house for this piece of turquoise. I remembered putting it in a “safe place” so safe now I can’t find it. I vividly recalled the piece because it was naturally rectangular shaped and polished smooth by the sand in the arroyo.

  But after that an obsession began to insinuate itself into my brain. Even after I found three pieces of turquoise larger and as nicely polished as the small rectangular piece, still I searched the house for the lost piece. What is it about us human beings that we can’t let go of lost things?

  The other morning I took a slow walk and found as much turquoise as I had found in a week of fast walks. I’ve trained my eyes to spot the smallest bit of blue or blue green as I scan the ground from side to side and up ahead. I will be delighted to take each turquoise pebble or rock and describe it in detail.

  Today I found a small piece of turquoise on the trail as it passes the Thunderbird Mine. Two or more turquoise ledges may exist higher in the mountains.

  Now that I have twenty or thirty pieces of the turquoise ledge, and many of them are much finer than the small rectangular stone, I can feel the obsession with the lost stone begin to recede in my consciousness.

  I make a point of collecting trash I spy as I walk along: shards of broken bottles, a piece of mud flap with “4 wheel” on it, and pieces of electrical wire coated in red and yellow plastic.

  This morning I spied four or five shards of broken glass that I picked up, but no turquoise. Was it because I thought there’d be no more turquoise that for two days I found none?

  At a point in the arroyo I passed many times before, I glanced down and there was a large piece of turquoise stone in plain view. How odd, I thought, because it was a rock the size of my fist yet I’d never notice
d it, and I’d walked the trail only the day before and I distinctly remembered walking past that very spot. I was sure I had not overlooked this turquoise rock. How did the rock get here? Flash floods down the arroyo stirred up the gravel and sand and often revealed new treasures, but there had been no rain at all for more than a month. This was the first time, but not the last that turquoise rocks mysteriously appeared overnight on the trail.

  I don’t limit myself to turquoise rocks. I keep a watch out for any sort of colorful or odd pebble or stone, and for bits of driftwood in the big arroyo. The Tucson Mountains were part of a volcanic ridge that exploded millions of years ago. Great fiery clouds welded ash and breccias of the basalt, quartzite and limestone that formed from the vast oceans that came and went from time to time. The great heat melted the quartz into chalcedony and jasper that sometimes bear hairline fractures from the shock of the volcanic explosions.

  The footpaths through the Tucson Mountains are ancient. Humans have lived in these hills and arroyos for thousands of years. The palo verde and mesquite trees give great quantities of beans in June and the saguaro fruit and prickly pear ripened at the same time; the small game and birds were easy to hunt. For the ancient people, these hills and arroyos held everything they might need for survival.