Storyteller Page 14

  We all had chores to do around home. My sister helped out around the house mostly, and I was supposed to carry water from the hydrant and bring in kindling. I helped my father look after the horses and pigs, and Uncle Tony milked the goats and fed them. One morning near the end of September I was out feeding the pigs their table scraps and pig mash; I’d given the pigs their food, and I was watching them squeal and snap at each other as they crowded into the feed trough. Behind me I could hear the milk squirting into the eight-pound lard pail that Uncle Tony used for milking.

  When he finished milking he noticed me standing there; he motioned toward the goats still inside the pen. “Run the rest of them out,” he said as he untied the two milk goats and carried the milk to the house.

  I was seven years old, and I understood that everyone, including my uncle, expected me to handle more chores; so I hurried over to the goat pen and swung the tall wire gate open. The does and kids came prancing out. They trotted daintily past the pigpen and scattered out, intent on finding leaves and grass to eat. It wasn’t until then I noticed that the billy goat hadn’t come out of the little wooden shed inside the goat pen. I stood outside the pen and tried to look inside the wooden shelter, but it was still early and the morning sun left the inside of the shelter in deep shadow. I stood there for a while, hoping that he would come out by himself, but I realized that he’d recognized me and that he wouldn’t come out. I understood right away what was happening and my fear of him was in my bowels and down my neck; I was shaking.

  Finally my uncle came out of the house; it was time for breakfast. “What’s wrong?” he called out from the door.

  “The billy goat won’t come out,” I yelled back, hoping he would look disgusted and come do it himself.

  “Get in there and get him out,” he said as he went back into the house.

  I looked around quickly for a stick or broom handle, or even a big rock, but I couldn’t find anything. I walked into the pen slowly, concentrating on the darkness beyond the shed door; I circled to the back of the shed and kicked at the boards, hoping to make the billy goat run out. I put my eye up to a crack between the boards, and I could see he was standing up now and that his yellow eyes were on mine.

  My mother was yelling at me to hurry up, and Uncle Tony was watching. I stepped around into the low doorway, and the goat charged toward me, feet first. I had dirt in my mouth and up my nose and there was blood running past my eye; my head ached. Uncle Tony carried me to the house; his face was stiff with anger, and I remembered what he’d always told us about animals; they won’t bother you unless you bother them first. I didn’t start to cry until my mother hugged me close and wiped my face with a damp wash rag. It was only a little cut above my eyebrow, and she sent me to school anyway with a Band-Aid on my forehead.

  Uncle Tony locked the billy goat in the pen. He didn’t say what he was going to do with the goat, but when he left with my father to haul firewood, he made sure the gate to the pen was wired tightly shut. He looked at the goat quietly and with sadness; he said something to the goat, but the yellow eyes stared past him.

  “What’s he going to do with the goat?” I asked my mother before I went to catch the school bus.

  “He ought to get rid of it,” she said. “We can’t have that goat knocking people down for no good reason.”

  I didn’t feel good at school. The teacher sent me to the nurse’s office and the nurse made me lie down. Whenever I closed my eyes I could see the goat and my uncle, and I felt a stiffness in my throat and chest. I got off the school bus slowly, so the other kids would go ahead without me. I walked slowly and wished I could be away from home for a while. I could go over to Grandma’s house, but she would ask me if my mother knew where I was and I would have to say no, and she would make me go home first to ask. So I walked very slowly, because I didn’t want to see the black goat’s hide hanging over the corral fence.

  When I got to the house I didn’t see a goat hide or the goat, but Uncle Tony was on his horse and my mother was standing beside the horse holding a canteen and a flour sack bundle tied with brown string. I was frightened at what this meant. My uncle looked down at me from the saddle.

  “The goat ran away,” he said. “Jumped out of the pen somehow. I saw him just as he went over the hill beyond the river. He stopped at the top of the hill and he looked back this way.”

  Uncle Tony nodded at my mother and me and then he left; we watched his old roan gelding splash across the stream and labor up the steep path beyond the river. Then they were over the top of the hill and gone.

  Uncle Tony was gone for three days. He came home early on the morning of the fourth day, before we had eaten breakfast or fed the animals. He was glad to be home, he said, because he was getting too old for such long rides. He called me over and looked closely at the cut above my eye. It had scabbed over good, and I wasn’t wearing a Band-Aid any more; he examined it very carefully before he let me go. He stirred some sugar into his coffee.

  “That goddamn goat,” he said. “I followed him for three days. He was headed south, going straight to Quemado. I never could catch up to him.” My uncle shook his head. “The first time I saw him he was already in the piñon forest, halfway into the mountains already. I could see him most of the time, off in the distance a mile or two. He would stop sometimes and look back.” Uncle Tony paused and drank some more coffee. “I stopped at night. I had to. He stopped too, and in the morning we would start out again. The trail just gets higher and steeper. Yesterday morning there was frost on top of the blanket when I woke up and we were in the big pines and red oak leaves. I couldn’t see him any more because the forest is too thick. So I turned around.” Tony finished the cup of coffee. “He’s probably in Quemado by now.”

  I looked at him again, standing there by the door, ready to go milk the nanny goats.

  “There wasn’t ever a goat like that one,” he said, “but if that’s the way he’s going to act, O.K. then. That damn goat got pissed off too easy anyway.”

  He smiled at me and his voice was strong and happy when he said this.

  My sisters with the buck my father brought back one hunting season.

  How to Write a Poem About the Sky

  for the students of the Bethel Middle

  School, Bethel, Alaska—Feb. 1975

  You see the sky now

  colder than the frozen river

  so dense and white

  little birds

  walk across it.

  You see the sky now

  but the earth

  is lost in it

  and there are no horizons.

  It is all

  a single breath.

  You see the sky

  but the earth is called

  by the same name

  the moment

  the wind shifts

  sun splits it open

  and bluish membranes

  push through slits of skin.

  You see the sky

  In Cold Storm Light

  In cold storm light

  I watch the sandrock

  canyon rim.

  The wind is wet

  with the smell of piñon.

  The wind is cold

  with the sound of juniper.

  And then

  out of the thick ice sky

  running swiftly

  pounding

  swirling above the treetops

  The snow elk come,

  Moving, moving

  white song

  storm wind in the branches.

  And when the elk have passed

  behind them

  a crystal train of snowflakes

  strands of mist

  tangled in rocks

  and leaves.

  Prayer to the Pacific

  I traveled to the ocean

  distant

  from my southwest land of sandrock

  to the moving blue water

  Big as the myth of origin.

  Pale


  pale water in the yellow-white light of

  sun floating west

  to China

  where ocean herself was born.

  Clouds that blow across the sand are wet.

  Squat in the wet sand and speak to the Ocean:

  I return to you turquoise the red coral you sent us,

  sister spirit of Earth.

  Four round stones in my pocket I carry back the ocean

  to suck and to taste.

  Thirty thousand years ago

  Indians came riding across the ocean

  carried by giant sea turtles.

  Waves were high that day

  great sea turtles waded slowly out

  from the gray sundown sea.

  Grandfather Turtle rolled in the sand four times

  and disappeared

  swimming into the sun.

  And so from that time

  immemorial,

  as the old people say,

  rain clouds drift from the west

  gift from the ocean.

  Green leaves in the wind

  Wet earth on my feet

  swallowing raindrops

  clear from China.

  Horses at Valley Store

  Everyday I meet the horses

  With dust and heat they come

  step by step

  Pulling the day

  behind them.

  At Valley Store

  there is water.

  Gray steel tank

  Narrow concrete trough.

  Eyes that smell water,

  In a line one by one

  moving with the weight of the sun

  moving through the deep earth heat

  They come.

  People with

  water barrels

  in pick-ups in wagons

  So they pause and from their distance

  outside of time

  They wait.

  September 20, the day after Laguna Feast is my father’s birthday. On that day, fifty-five years ago, Grandma Lillie said she worked all day at Abie’s store; she even drove the old cut-down car to Seama to deliver groceries up there. Late that afternoon she finally went to bed and around six o’clock she heard the church bells ringing the Angelus. She was listening, she said, to the Angelus bells ringing and just as the bells finished ringing he was born.

  The Man to Send Rain Clouds

  They found him under a big cottonwood tree. His Levi jacket and pants were faded light blue so that he had been easy to find. The big cottonwood tree stood apart from a small grove of winterbare cottonwoods which grew in the wide, sandy arroyo. He had been dead for a day or more, and the sheep had wandered and scattered up and down the arroyo. Leon and his brother-in-law, Ken, gathered the sheep and left them in the pen at the sheep camp before they returned to the cottonwood tree. Leon waited under the tree while Ken drove the truck through the deep sand to the edge of the arroyo. He squinted up at the sun and unzipped his jacket—it sure was hot for this time of year. But high and northwest the blue mountains were still in snow. Ken came sliding down the low, crumbling bank about fifty yards down, and he was bringing the red blanket.

  Before they wrapped the old man, Leon took a piece of string out of his pocket and tied a small gray feather in the old man’s long white hair. Ken gave him the paint. Across the brown wrinkled forehead he drew a streak of white and along the high cheekbones he drew a strip of blue paint.

  He paused and watched Ken throw pinches of corn meal and pollen into the wind that fluttered the small gray feather. Then Leon painted with yellow under the old man’s broad nose, and finally, when he had painted green across the chin, he smiled.

  “Send us rain clouds, Grandfather.” They laid the bundle in the back of the pickup and covered it with a heavy tarp before they started back to the pueblo.

  They turned off the highway onto the sandy pueblo road. Not long after they passed the store and post office they saw Father Paul’s car coming toward them. When he recognized their faces he slowed his car and waved for them to stop. The young priest rolled down the car window.

  “Did you find old Teofilo?” he asked loudly.

  Leon stopped the truck. “Good morning, Father. We were just out to the sheep camp. Everything is O.K. now.”

  “Thank God for that. Teofilo is a very old man. You really shouldn’t allow him to stay at the sheep camp alone.”

  “No, he won’t do that any more now.”

  “Well, I’m glad you understand. I hope I’ll be seeing you at Mass this week—we missed you last Sunday. See if you can get old Teofilo to come with you.” The priest smiled and waved at them as they drove away.

  Louise and Teresa were waiting. The table was set for lunch, and the coffee was boiling on the black iron stove. Leon looked at Louise and then at Teresa.

  “We found him under a cottonwood tree in the big arroyo near sheep camp. I guess he sat down to rest in the shade and never got up again.” Leon walked toward the old man’s bed. The red plaid shawl had been shaken and spread carefully over the bed, and a new brown flannel shirt and pair of stiff new Levi’s were arranged neatly beside the pillow. Louise held the screen door open while Leon and Ken carried in the red blanket. He looked small and shriveled, and after they dressed him in the new shirt and pants he seemed more shrunken.

  It was noontime now because the church bells rang the Angelus. They ate the beans with hot bread, and nobody said anything until after Teresa poured the coffee.

  Ken stood up and put on his jacket. “I’ll see about the gravediggers. Only the top layer of soil is frozen. I think it can be ready before dark.”

  Leon nodded his head and finished his coffee. After Ken had been gone for a while, the neighbors and clanspeople came quietly to embrace Teofilo’s family and to leave food on the table because the gravediggers would come to eat when they were finished.

  The sky in the west was full of pale yellow light. Louise stood outside with her hands in the pockets of Leon’s green army jacket that was too big for her. The funeral was over, and the old men had taken their candles and medicine bags and were gone. She waited until the body was laid into the pickup before she said anything to Leon. She touched his arm, and he noticed that her hands were still dusty from the corn meal that she had sprinkled around the old man. When she spoke, Leon could not hear her.

  “What did you say? I didn’t hear you.”

  “I said that I had been thinking about something.”

  “About what?”

  “About the priest sprinkling holy water for Grandpa. So he won’t be thirsty.”

  Leon stared at the new moccasins that Teofilo had made for the ceremonial dances in the summer. They were nearly hidden by the red blanket. It was getting colder, and the wind pushed gray dust down the narrow pueblo road. The sun was approaching the long mesa where it disappeared during the winter. Louise stood there shivering and watching his face. Then he zipped up his jacket and opened the truck door. “I’ll see if he’s there.”

  Ken stopped the pickup at the church, and Leon got out; and then Ken drove down the hill to the graveyard where people were waiting. Leon knocked at the old carved door with its symbols of the Lamb. While he waited he looked up at the twin bells from the king of Spain with the last sunlight pouring around them in their tower.

  The priest opened the door and smiled when he saw who it was. “Come in! What brings you here this evening?”

  The priest walked toward the kitchen, and Leon stood with his cap in his hand, playing with the earflaps and examining the living room—the brown sofa, the green armchair, and the brass lamp that hung down from the ceiling by links of chain. The priest dragged a chair out of the kitchen and offered it to Leon.

  “No thank you, Father. I only came to ask you if you would bring your holy water to the graveyard.”

  The priest turned away from Leon and looked out the window at the patio full of shadows and the dining-room windows of the nuns’ cloister across the patio. The curtains
were heavy, and the light from within faintly penetrated; it was impossible to see the nuns inside eating supper. “Why didn’t you tell me he was dead? I could have brought the Last Rites anyway.”

  Leon smiled. “It wasn’t necessary, Father.”

  The priest stared down at his scuffed brown loafers and the worn hem of his cassock. “For a Christian burial it was necessary.”

  His voice was distant, and Leon thought that his blue eyes looked tired.

  “It’s O.K. Father, we just want him to have plenty of water.”

  The priest sank down into the green chair and picked up a glossy missionary magazine. He turned the colored pages full of lepers and pagans without looking at them.

  “You know I can’t do that, Leon. There should have been the Last Rites and a funeral Mass at the very least.”

  Leon put on his green cap and pulled the flaps down over his ears. “It’s getting late, Father. I’ve got to go.”

  When Leon opened the door Father Paul stood up and said, “Wait.” He left the room and came back wearing a long brown overcoat. He followed Leon out the door and across the dim churchyard to the adobe steps in front of the church. They both stooped to fit through the low adobe entrance. And when they started down the hill to the graveyard only half of the sun was visible above the mesa.