Storyteller

  until the last spine bone

  was arranged at the base of the tail.

  “A’moo’ooh, my dear one

  these words are bones,”

  he repeated this

  four times

  Pa Pa Pa Pa!

  Pa Pa Pa Pa!

  Pa Pa Pa Pa!

  Pa Pa Pa Pa!

  Old Coyote Woman jumped up

  and took off running.

  She never even said “thanks.”

  Skeleton Fixer

  shook his head slowly.

  “It is surprising sometimes,” he said

  “how these things turn out.”

  But he never has stopped fixing

  the poor scattered bones he finds.

  A Piece of a Bigger Story They Tell Around Laguna and Acoma Too

  —From a Version Told by Simon J. Ortiz

  On Sundays Grandpa Hank liked to go driving.

  Usually we went to Los Lunas

  because Grandma Lillie had relatives there.

  We took the old winding road that follows

  the San José river until it meets the Rio Puerco.

  Not far from the junction of the rivers

  is a high prominent mesa of dark volcanic rock.

  On one of these Sunday drives long ago

  Grandpa told us two of his grand-uncles had died there

  killed by the Apaches who stole their sheep.

  I remember looking very hard out the window of the car

  at the great dark mesa and the rolling plains below it.

  I have passed the mesa many times since.

  The plains below the mesa

  are still as grassy and good range for sheep

  as they had been long ago.

  The Storyteller’s Escape

  The storyteller keeps the stories

  all the escape stories

  she says “With these stories of ours

  we can escape almost anything

  with these stories we will survive.”

  The old teller has been on every journey

  and she knows all the escape stories

  even stories told before she was born.

  She keeps the stories for those who return

  but more important

  for the dear ones who do not come back

  so that we may remember them

  and cry for them with the stories.

  “In this way

  we hold them

  and keep them with us forever

  and in this way

  we continue.”

  This story is remembered

  as her best story

  it is the storyteller’s own escape.

  In those days

  the people would leave the village

  and hurry into the lava flows

  where they waited until the enemy had gone.

  “This time they were close behind us

  and we could not stop to rest.

  On the afternoon of the fourth day

  I was wearing the sun

  for a hat.

  Always before

  it was me

  turning around

  for the last look

  at the pregnant woman

  the crippled boy

  old man Shio’see

  slowing up

  lying down

  never getting up again.

  Always before

  I was the one who looked back

  before the humpback hills

  rose between us

  so I could tell where these dear ones stopped.”

  But sooner or later

  even a storyteller knows it will happen.

  The only thing was

  this time

  she couldn’t be sure

  if there would be anyone

  to look back

  and later tell the others:

  She stopped on the north side of Dough Mountain

  and she said:

  “The sun is a shawl on my back

  its heat makes tassels that

  shimmer down my arms.”

  And then she sat down in the shade

  and closed her eyes.

  She was thinking

  this was how she would want them

  to remember her and cry for her

  If only somebody had looked back

  to see her face for the last time

  Someone who would know then

  and tell the others:

  “The black hills rose between us

  the shady rock was above her head

  and she was thinking

  There won’t be any escape story this time

  unless maybe someone tells

  how the sweat spilled over the rock

  making streams in hills

  that had no water.

  She was thinking

  I could die peacefully

  if there was just someone to tell

  how I finally stopped

  and where.

  She believed

  in this kind of situation

  you have to do the best you can.

  So I just might as well think of a story

  while I’m waiting to die:

  A’moo’ooh, the child looked back.

  “Don’t wait!

  Go on without me!

  Tell them I said that—

  Tell them I’m too old too tired

  I’d rather just die here

  in the shade

  I’d rather just die

  than climb these rocky hills

  in the hot sun.

  The child turned back for a last look at her

  off in the distance leaning against a cool rock

  the old teller waiting for the enemy to find her.

  The child knew

  how she had been on all the escape journeys

  how she hated the enemy.

  She knew

  what she was thinking

  what she was saying to herself:

  “I’ll fix them good!

  I’ll fool them!

  I’ll already be dead

  when the enemies come.”

  She laughed out loud.

  I’ll die just to spite them!

  She was resting close to the boulder

  hoping the child would tell—

  otherwise

  how could they remember her

  how could they cry for her

  without this story?

  About this time

  the sun lifted off from her shoulders like a butterfly.

  Let the enemy wear it now!

  Let them see how they like the heat

  wrapping them in its blanket!

  She laughed sitting there

  thinking to herself

  until it got dark.

  They would cry when they were told

  the sun had been her hat

  until she could walk no more

  the sun had been a shawl

  until she had to sit down in the shade.

  This one’s the best one yet—

  too bad nobody may ever hear it.

  She waited all night

  but at dawn

  there was still no sign of the enemy.

  So she decided

  to go back to the village.

  What difference would it make

  if she ran into the enemy?

  She had already waited

  all night

  for them to come along

  and finish her.

  But she didn’t see anyone

  no enemy.

  Maybe the sun got to be too much for them too

  And it was the best escape story she had come up with yet

  How four days later when the people came back

  from their hide-outs in the lava flow

  there she was

  sitting in front of her house

  waiting for them.

  This is the story she told,

  the chil
d who looked back,

  the old teller’s escape—

  the story she was thinking of

  her getaway story

  how they remembered her

  and cried for her

  Because she always had a way with stories

  even on the last day

  when she stopped in the shade

  on the north side of Dough Mountain.

  Helen’s Warning at New Oraibi:

  “You must be very quiet and listen respectfully.

  Otherwise the storyteller might get upset and pout

  and not say another word all night.”

  In 1918 Franz Boas, ethnologist and linguist

  passed through Laguna.

  His talented protégé

  Elsie Clews Parsons

  stayed behind to collect Laguna texts

  from which Boas planned to construct

  a grammer of the Laguna language.

  Boas, as it turns out

  was tone-deaf

  and the Laguna language is tonal

  so it is fortunate he allowed Ms. Parsons

  to do the actual collecting of the stories.

  Although Boas was never able to construct the Laguna grammar

  he did distinguish himself

  with the languages of Northwest Coast tribes

  which are not tonal languages.

  In the collection which Parsons made

  there is a coyote story

  told in Laguna

  by my great-grandfather.

  It is a very simple story

  with a little song

  which is repeated four times

  the meadowlark teasing the she-coyote

  calling her

  “Coyote long-long-long-long mouth!”

  Until Coyote gets so confused and upset

  she spits out the water

  she was carrying back to her pups.

  Four times Coyote tries to carry the water back

  and four times Meadowlark sings this song

  “Coyote long-long-long-long mouth!”

  and Coyote opens her mouth

  spilling the water.

  When she finally gets back to her pups

  they are all dead from thirst.

  A good deal of controversy surrounded

  and still surrounds my great-grandfather and his brother

  who both married Laguna women.

  Ethnologists blame the Marmon brothers

  for all kinds of factions and trouble at Laguna

  and I am sure much of it is true—

  their arrival was bound to complicate

  the already complex politics at Laguna.

  They came on the heels of a Baptist preacher named Gorman

  who also must have upset Laguna ceremonialism.

  All I know of my great-grandpa Marmon

  are the stories my family told

  and the old photographs which show him

  a tall thin old white man

  with a white beard

  wearing a black suit coat

  and derby hat.

  He stands with his darker sons

  and behind the wire-rim glasses he wore

  I see in his eyes

  he had come to understand this world

  differently.

  Maybe he chose that particular coyote story

  to tell Parsons

  because for him at Laguna

  that was the one thing he had to remember:

  No matter what is said to you by anyone

  you must take care of those most dear to you.

  Coyote Holds a Full House in His Hand

  He wasn’t getting any place with Mrs. Sekakaku, he could see that. She was warming up leftover chili beans for lunch and when her niece came over they left him alone on the red plastic sofa and talked at the kitchen table. Aunt Mamie was still sick that’s what her niece was telling her and they were all so worried because the doctors at Keams Canyon said they’d tried everything already and old man Ko’ite had come over from Oraibi and still Aunt Mamie was having dizzy spells and couldn’t get out of bed. He was looking at the same Life magazine he’d already looked at before and it didn’t have any pictures of high school girls twirling batons or plane crashes or anything he wanted to look at more than twice, but he didn’t want to listen to them because then he’d know just what kind of gossip Mrs. Sekakaku found more important than him and his visit. He set the magazine down on his lap and traced his finger over the horse head embossed on the plastic cushion. It was always like that. When he didn’t expect it, it always came to him, but when he wanted something to happen, like with Mrs. Sekakaku, then it shied away. Mrs. Sekakaku’s letters had made the corner of the trading post where the mailboxes were smell like the perfume counter at Woolworth’s. The Mexican woman with the fat arms was the postmaster and ran the trading post. She didn’t approve of perfumed letters and she used to pretend the letters weren’t there even when he could smell them and see their pastel edges sticking out of the pile in the general delivery slot.

  The Mexican woman thought Pueblo men were great lovers—he knew this because he heard her say so to another Mexican woman one day while he was finishing his strawberry soda on the other side of the dry goods section. In the summer he spent a good number of hours there watching her because she wore sleeveless blouses that revealed her fat upper arms, full and round, and the tender underarm creases curving to her breasts. They had not noticed he was still there leaning on the counter behind a pile of overalls; “…the size of a horse” was all that he had heard, but he knew what she was talking about. They were all like that, those Mexican women. That was all they talked about when they were alone. “As big as a horse”—he knew that much Spanish and more too, but she had never treated him nice, not even when he brought her the heart-shaped box of candy, carried it on the bus all the way from Albuquerque. He didn’t think it was being older than her because she was over thirty herself—it was because she didn’t approve of men who drank. That was the last thing he did before he left town; he did it because he had to, because liquor was illegal on the reservation. So the last thing he did was have a few drinks to carry home with him the same way other people stocked up on lamb nipples or extra matches. She must have smelled it on his breath when he handed her the candy because she didn’t say anything and she left the box under the counter by the old newspapers and balls of string. The cellophane was never opened and the fine gray dust that covered everything in the store finally settled on the pink satin bow. The postmaster was jealous of the letters that were coming, but she was the one who had sent him into the arms of Mrs. Sekakaku.

  In her last two letters Mrs. Sekakaku had been hinting around for him to come see her at Bean Dance time. This was after Christmas when he had sent a big poinsettia plant all the way to the Second Mesa on the mail bus. Up until then she had never answered the part in his letters where he said he wished he could see the beautiful Hopi mesas with snow on them. But that had been the first time a potted plant ever rode into Hopi on the mail bus and Mrs. Sekakaku finally realized the kind of man he was. All along that had been the trouble at Laguna, nobody understood just what kind of man he was. They thought he was sort of good for nothing, he knew that, but for a long time he kept telling himself to keep on trying and trying. But it seemed like people would never forget the time the whole village was called out to clean up for feast day and he sent his mother to tell them he was sick with liver trouble. He was still hurt because they didn’t understand that with liver trouble you can walk around and sometimes even ride the bus to Albuquerque. Everyone was jealous of him and they didn’t stop to think how much it meant to his mother to have someone living with her in her old age. All they could talk about was the big C.O.D. that came to the post office in his name and she cashed her pension check to pay for it. But she was the one who told him, “Sonny Boy, if you want that jacket, you go ahead and order it.” It was made out of brown vinyl resembling leather and he still wore
it whenever he went to town. Even on the day she had the last stroke his two older brothers had been telling her to quit paying his bills for him and to make him get out and live on his own. But she always stood up for him in front of the others even if she did complain privately at times to her nieces who then scolded him about the bills from the record club and the correspondence school. He always knew he could be a lawyer—he had listened to the lawyers in the courtrooms of the Federal Building on those hot summer afternoons when he needed a cool place to sit while he waited for the bus to Laguna. He listened and he knew he could be a lawyer because he was so good at making up stories to justify why things happened the way they did. He thought correspondence school would be different from Indian school which had given him stomach aches and made him run away all through his seventh grade year. Right after that he had cut his foot pretty bad chopping wood for his older brother’s wife, the one who kept brushing her arm across his shoulders whenever she poured coffee at the supper table. The foot had taken so long to heal that his mother agreed he shouldn’t go back to Indian School or chop wood anymore. A few months after that they were all swimming at the river and he hurt his back in a dive off the old wooden bridge so it was no wonder he couldn’t do the same work as the other young men.

  When Mildred told him she was marrying that Hopi, he didn’t try to stop her although she stood there for a long time like she was waiting for him to say something. He liked things just the way they were down along the river after dark. Her mother and aunts owned so many fields they expected a husband to hoe and he had already promised his mother he wouldn’t leave her alone in her old age. He thought it would be easier this way but after Mildred’s wedding, people who had seen him and Mildred together started joking about how he had lost out to a Hopi.

  Hopi men were famous for their fast hands and the way they could go on all night. Some of the jokes hinted that he was as lazy at lovemaking as he was with his shovel during Spring ditch cleaning and that he took his girl friends to the deep sand along the river so he could lie on the bottom while they worked on top. But later on, some of the older men took him aside and told him not to feel bad about Mildred and told him about women they’d lost to Hopis when they were all working on the railroad together in Winslow. Women believe those stories about Hopi men, they told him, because women like the sound of those stories, and they don’t care if it’s the Hopi men who are making up the stories in the first place. So when he finally found himself riding the Greyhound bus into Winslow on his way to see Mrs. Sekakaku and the Bean Dance he got to thinking about those stories about Hopi men. It had been years since Mildred had married that Hopi and her aunts and her mother kept the man working in their fields all year round. Even Laguna people said “poor thing” whenever they saw that Hopi man walking past with a shovel on his shoulder. So he knew he wasn’t going because of that—he was going because of Mrs. Sekakaku’s letters and because it was lonely living in a place where no one appreciates you even when you keep trying and trying. At Hopi he could get a fresh start; he could tell people about himself while they looked at the photos in the plastic pages of his wallet.