The Almanac of the Dead: A Novel Page 15

  “Remember all this when Lecha is struggling to make sense out of the notebooks.” “Ask Zeta how many of the missing pages got sold off to her tourists from the United States.” Of course Zeta had never seen anything like the fragments of the manuscript of glyphs. All that had ever moved through the garages of Mrs. Mares had been pottery and figurines, with a scattering of carved stone or jade axes and knives. When Zeta had informed Yoeme that they were out of the antiquities business and “working in other areas,” old Yoeme had crowed, “Sold it all away! It’s all gone and now you move to something else!” Zeta nodded. She had seen no point in arguing either with her grandmother or her sister.

  Old Yoeme had been in the mood to talk that day:

  I have kept the notebooks and the old book since it was passed on to me many years ago. A section of one of the notebooks had accidentally been lost right before they were given to me. The woman who had been keeping them explained what the lost section had said, although of course it was all in a code, so that the true meaning would not be immediately clear. She requested that, if possible, at some time in my life I should write down a replacement section.

  I have thought about it all my life. The problem has been the meaning of the lost section and for me to find a way of replacing it. One naturally reflects upon one’s own experiences and feelings throughout one’s life. The woman warned that it should not be just any sort of words.

  I am telling you this because you must understand how carefully the old manuscript and its notebooks must be kept. Nothing must be added that was not already there. Only repairs are allowed, and one might live as long as I have and not find a suitable code.

  I must always return to what the white men kept hanging in all the lovely cottonwood trees along the rivers and streams throughout this land. Swaying in the light wind, rags of clothing flapping the shrunken limbs into motion. They try to walk, they try to walk—the feet keep reaching long after the neck has broken or the head has choked. In those days the Mexican soldiers were not particular about whom they killed so long as they were Indians found near the mountains. Before dawn they fired upon a camp, taking it for Indian, and the Mexican soldiers killed a young American lieutenant and an American cavalry scout. They were all hunting the Apaches running with the man they called Geronimo. That was not his name. No wonder there has been so much confusion among white people and their historians. The man encouraged the confusion. He has been called a medicine man, but that title is misleading. He was a man who was able to perform certain feats.

  I have seen the photographs that are labeled “Geronimo.” I have seen the photograph of the so-called surrender at Skeleton Canyon where General Miles sits in the shade of a mesquite tree flanked by his captains as he makes false promises and lies. But the Apache man identified in the photographs is not, of course, the man the U.S. army has been chasing. He is a man who always accompanied the one who performed certain feats. He is the man who agreed to play the role for the protection of the other man. The man in the photographs had been promised safe conduct by the man he protected. The man in the photographs was a brilliant and resourceful man. He may not have known that while he would find wealth and fame in the lifelong captivity, he would not again see the mountains during his life. The man who fled had further work to do, work that could not be done in captivity.

  When the mountain people came down for salt or for other necessities, they came to bring the news and maybe some herb delicacy for me. This man accompanied them. He did not remain with the others talking on the porch or eating roast mutton inside. He walked down here, right to this place we are standing.

  I had walked out on the second-story porch carrying one of the babies—it was Amalia, your mother. She was always crying and puking milk. I could see the man very clearly. The others had told me that he had certain work he must do, which was why they had brought him down with them. No one was to know who he was. It was a very dangerous time then. The soldiers were killing Indians left and right. I watched the man for a long time. Amalia fell asleep in my arms. He was watching the gulls ride the waves in and out. I began to remember my wonder at the rising of the waves when I first saw the sea. The sun was setting into the water. The tide was going out. The gulls were being carried farther and farther away into the bright gold light of the last sun across the water. I never moved my eyes from the man at the edge of the water. But in an instant he was gone. All I could see was a gull riding a wave, floating and stretching its wings in the lazy way the gulls have.

  That is all. Take me back. I am tired.

  They argued over what was easier. Lecha wanted to go back to the house and get the car, but Yoeme refused to ride in one. Zeta thought the deep sand made uphill with the old wheelchair impossible and said she could more easily carry Yoeme. But the old woman said her bones might poke through her skin if Zeta tried something stupid like that. So they took turns struggling up the sandy road from the beach, old Yoeme sleeping through the jerks and skids. They got too winded to talk. They never discussed the story Yoeme had told them on the beach, but Lecha had been careful to write it down in the notebook with the blank pages. After she had written it, old Yoeme had demanded to see it, and it was then they realized it was the first entry that had been written in English. Zeta waited for Yoeme to break into a fury. But she had rocked herself from side to side, sighing with pleasure. Yoeme claimed this was the sign the keepers of the notebooks had always prayed for.

  It had been Yoeme in the first place who talked to snakes. She claimed to consult the big bull snake out behind the adobe woodshed. Zeta had learned it from her. What did the snake tell her? the two girls had wanted to know. Nothing the girls would be allowed to hear. Old Yoeme had never got along with churchgoers. She had her own picture of things. Snakes crawled under the ground. They heard the voices of the dead: actual conversations, and lone voices calling out to loved ones still living. Snakes heard the confessions of murderers and arsonists after innocent people had been accused. Why did Catholic priests always kill snakes? The twins nodded their heads solemnly at their grandmother. Snakes moved through the tall weeds, and under the edges of rocks and up through the branches of trees. They saw and heard a good deal that way: where husbands crept away, where wives embraced lovers. Snakes saw what illicit couples did, in turkey pens after dark, in the arroyo by the trash pile, all the sexual excesses the two girls had been able to imagine, but were not allowed to hear. Yoeme had the girls begging.

  Lecha could not bear to face the big bull snake. She closed her eyes and tried. But she could not bear to see him thick and coiled in the shady spot by the hole in the wall where he slept. Lecha could not endure to watch his slippery, black fork tongue dart in and out, in and out. “Well, you go on back to the porch,” Yoeme had told her. “Not everyone can do this. Your sister can tell you what he says.”

  Zeta had waited until Yoeme called her closer. The snake was not so stupid that he did not know a stranger. Although he does know you two girls because you play out here sometimes. But you can’t just go rushing at them. Bad manners. You can’t have a conversation right away. It is no different from with humans. Let him hear your heartbeat. Let him hear your breathing.

  It was something Zeta did alone with her grandmother. In the fall, as the days were cooling off, they would find the big bull snake sunning himself on the south side of the woodshed. Yoeme had picked him up carefully, supporting his long body with one hand as she cradled him against her chest. “He likes the warmth, you see,” and it had been then Zeta understood that the big snake recognized Yoeme, because he lay quietly, only his tongue moving slowly in and out at Zeta.

  Zeta had never mentioned any of this to Lecha because she could not exactly explain how it had worked. Certainly the snake didn’t talk. But looking at the snake as it curled in Yoeme’s arms and thinking how beautifully the light brown spots were with the pale yellow under it, Zeta had for no reason thought of Grandpa Guzman not as her grandpa, but as the “old white man,” which was what o
thers, outside the family, called him. She had thought of him overturned and moaning feebly for help. And her aunt Popa was ignoring him because she figured there would be something dirty to clean up. All Zeta had ever thought was that she knew how it worked, how one talked to snakes. But it had not impressed her.

  So, years later, when old Yoeme had given Lecha the notebooks to decipher, Zeta had been surprised that the old woman said, “Your skills lie elsewhere, don’t they?” Lecha had glanced at Zeta to try to figure out what old Yoeme had meant. But Zeta did not change her expression, and their grandmother drifted into one of her long naps—a long nap that finally one warm afternoon four days later had not ended.

  THE INDIAN WAY

  ZETA HAD NOT NEEDED Calabazas after the first loan from him was repaid, but she had played along for a while because she was interested in what he might do next. He said that the two of them could have the run of the town when it came to “commodities” crossing the border. This proposal had come shortly after he had visited the old ranch in the mountains and had realized the possibilities. Zeta thought this had also come about the time Calabazas was beginning to realize that she was not going to be swept into his bed as other women generally were.

  Calabazas had gotten amorous at sundown while Zeta was explaining what her father had told them about the big volcano that had once been there and about the giant explosion that had destroyed it. Zeta had been showing him different rocks containing bits of volcanic ash melted into them. She had been explaining that her father had wanted to spend his retirement studying these rocks and the ore deposits of these mountains when Calabazas had tried to gather her into his arms for a big kiss. But Zeta had seen the move coming, and she had twisted away expertly, dropping the rock she had been showing him on his foot. “You are not like your twin sister,” Calabazas had said, shaking his head. “No,” Zeta had replied, “I’m not.” And a week later Zeta had arranged the biggest haul of gold coins yet, and Calabazas and his people knew nothing about it. She had not trusted a deal that big to anyone. She had loaded Ferro’s diaper bag, car bed, and toys into the backseat of a big Hudson Hornet. The old widow and Ferro had ridden in front beside her. Zeta purposely wore a full, loose blouse over her plain, dark skirt that might suggest pregnancy. At the border crossing in El Paso, the U.S. guards had made only a quick check of the trunk. The mighty frame and springs of the Hudson Hornet had not held their load without sagging, but they seemed not to notice. Or they had passed it off to the two large Indian women, the large baby, and the load of baby gear.

  The old widow-woman had not asked questions, but from time to time she had made comments too low to make out, although once or twice Zeta had heard her mumbling something about “this” not being “the Indian way.” Zeta and Lecha had heard about the “Indian way” for years and years. Their aunties and dirty-fingered uncles despised what they called “Indians” until it suited them; then suddenly the “Indian way” was all-important if and when the “Indian way” worked to their advantage. Zeta did not want to hear about “the Indian way” from anyone who was her own employee. Zeta had stared at the old woman for a long time. What wasn’t the “Indian way”?

  The people had been free to go traveling north and south for a thousand years, traveling as they pleased, then suddenly white priests had announced smuggling as a mortal sin because smuggling was stealing from the government.

  Zeta wondered if the priests who told the people smuggling was stealing had also told them how they were to feed themselves now that all the fertile land along the rivers had been stolen by white men. Where were the priest and his Catholic Church when the federal soldiers used Yaqui babies for target practice? Stealing from the “government”? What “government” was that? Mexico City? Zeta had laughed out loud. Washington, D.C.? How could one steal if the government itself was the worst thief?

  There was not, and there never had been, a legal government by Europeans anywhere in the Americas. Not by any definition, not even by the Europeans’ own definitions and laws. Because no legal government could be established on stolen land. Because stolen land never had clear title. Zeta could recite Yoeme’s arguments and crazed legal theories better and better as time went by. All the laws of the illicit governments had to be blasted away. Every waking hour Zeta spent scheming and planning to break as many of their laws as she could.

  War had been declared the first day the Spaniards set foot on Native American soil, and the same war had been going on ever since: the war was for the continents called the Americas.

  Calabazas said the widow did not think it was the Indian way to use an old woman and a little child as her “cover” for the business of crossing the border. He had been leaning against his pickup truck with a toothpick hanging out of the corner of his mouth, staring off in the distance at the highest peak in the Tucson range.

  Zeta had laughed loudly—something she only did when she was angry or surprised. “Who said anything about the ‘Indian way’?” Zeta demanded.

  Calabazas turned and looked at her and shook his head. “Hey, don’t get mad at me, I didn’t say it, she did.”

  “Tell her she’s fired then,” Zeta said.

  YOEME’S OLD NOTEBOOKS

  ZETA GAVE UP on men after Mr. Coco. He hadn’t been the first, but she had decided he would be the last. She was not afraid to know the truth. She could feel what she knew. She was different from other women, just as she and Lecha had always been different from all the others. Zeta had begun to feel a wearisome repetition in the love affairs. Hot, awkward motions, foul breath, and the ticking of a clock in the room. She knew how the love would trickle away before the sweat dried on the bed sheets.

  Around the same time Zeta gave up on men, she had come across the notebooks old Yoeme had left her. Zeta had begun examining the bundle of pages and scraps of paper with notes in Latin and Spanish. Lecha had all the notebooks but this one. Yoeme said it was to ensure Lecha did not try to hog the notebooks for herself; this had been Yoeme’s way of teasing Lecha, but also a reminder the old woman expected the sisters to care for one another throughout their lives.

  Old Yoeme had given Zeta the smallest bundle of loose notebook pages and scraps of paper with drawings of snakes. Yoeme had warned Zeta not to brag to Lecha, but the notebook of the snakes was the key to understanding all the rest of the old almanac. The drawings of the snakes were in beautiful colors of ink, but Zeta had been disappointed after she began deciphering Yoeme’s scrawls in misspelled Spanish. This did not seem to be the “key” to anything except one old woman’s madness.

  Pages From the Snakes’ Notebook

  Maah’ shra-True’-Ee is the giant serpent

  the sacred messenger spirit

  from the Fourth World below.

  He came to live at the Beautiful Lake, Ka-waik,

  that was once near Laguna village.

  But neighbors got jealous.

  They came one night and broke open the lake

  so all the water was lost. The giant snake

  went away after that. He has never been seen since.

  That was a great misfortune for us, the Ka-waik’meh,

  at Old Laguna.

  Spirit Snake’s Message

  I have been talking to you people from the beginning

  I have told you the names and identities of the Days and Years.

  I have told you the stories on each day and year so you could be prepared

  and protect yourselves.

  What I have told you has always been true.

  What I have to tell you now is that

  this world is about to end.

  Those were the last words of the giant serpent. The days that were to come had been foretold. The people scattered. Killers came from all directions. And more killers followed, to kill them.

  One day a story will arrive at your town. It will come from far away, from the southwest or southeast—people won’t agree. The story may arrive with a stranger or perhaps with the parrot trader. But when
you hear this story, you will know it is the signal for you and the others to prepare.

  Quetzalcoatl gathered the bones of the dead and sprinkled them with his own blood, and humanity was reborn.

  Sacred time is always in the Present.

  1. almanakh: Arabic.

  2. almanac: A.D.1267 English from the Arabic.

  3. almanaque: A.D.1505 Spanish from the Arabic.

  4. a book of tables containing a calendar of months and days with astronomical data and calculations.

  5. predicts or foretells the auspicious days, the ecclesiastical and other anniversaries.

  6. short glyphic passages give the luck of the day.

  7. Madrid

  Paris Codices

  Dresden

  Leave it to Lecha to show up with the remaining notebooks and the notion her transcriptions would be unique and never thought of before. Zeta had already completed the pages of the notebook Yoeme had given her. Zeta did not believe it was an accident Lecha had returned just as Zeta had finished typing the transcriptions of the pages into the computer.

  Zeta feels a sudden sadness at the sound of their voices. She is not sure why. Maybe it’s because Lecha and the blond woman are friendly with each other, and she feels so alone. But she does not turn back from the bedroom door, which is ajar. Zeta knocks and the blond woman startles and moves away from her, across the room to an open window. “I haven’t killed and eaten anyone for some time now,” Zeta says to Seese, who blushes and returns to the chair by the bed. “It’s the color of clothes you wear,” Lecha says quite seriously. “After a while the dark brown color begins to shout something at all of us.”