Death Chants (23 page)

The two young men
stared at the old man in puzzlement. For the first time, doubt began to show on their faces. They
seemed to be considering the idea that the old man might not be dead.

Natchez felt he had
convinced them and tried to straighten up, but his back was locked in place.

The old man winced
with pain. He tried to move but he just couldn't. He looked at the two young men with growing
embar­rassment. "I'm stuck! You young fellows are gonna have to help me!"

Tato and Elk Boy
exchanged a knowing look.

Tato said, "He'd do
anything to get out of this, wouldn't he?"

Elk Boy nodded.
"Some people just don't know when to quit. They just make up any old little thing and we're
supposed to buy it. Jesus! What does he think we are, a couple of tourists?"

Tato shook his head
in disgust. "First he says he isn't dead, but he is; now he says he's stuck. He's a shameless old
liar is what he is, if you ask me."

Elk Boy regarded
the old man with disdain. "Yeah. I heard about corpses suddenly sitting up on their burial rack.
Muscles spasms is what it is, or maybe they ate something that didn't agree with them and they
got gas or something, you know, from stomach cramps or something like that. Well the old faker
must be just having one of those damn muscle spasms. That's got to be why the old devil is now
folded in two. Guy just don't know when to quit lying, is how I see it."

Natchez strained
against his locked back, his face contorted with the effort.

"I TELL YOU I'M
STUCK!"

Elk Boy came over,
grabbed Natchez's arms from behind, put his foot on the old man's back and tried to lever him
up.

The old man
shrieked with pain but nothing happened.

Elk Boy said, "OK,
I'll give him this one. He IS stuck! That's the most rigorous mortis I've ever seen."

Natchez looked
triumphant despite his awkward position. "If I was telling the truth on this one, I could also be
telling the truth about not being dead. How's that strike you?"

"Quit fooling,"
said Tato. "You're too dead to skin."

He bent over and
stared into the old man's face. "Now you're really giving us a hard time, old man. How are we
going to bury you at a right angle?"

Elk Boy nodded
glumly, looking supremely unhappy. "I tell you, old people are nothing but trouble," he also bent
over to look at the old man.

It looked odd with
all three of them bent over in the middle of nowhere. It looked like a symbol of something or
other. Nobody knew just exactly of what.

Elk Boy finally
summed it up. He was disgusted. "Well, he sure isn't going to fit in the coffin that way, that's
for damn sure."

Tato straightened
up and moved closer to the old man. He grabbed the old man's head suddenly and tried to push it
down to the ground.

"Maybe I can fold
him," said Tato.

Natchez shrieked,
"You maniac! I can't bend that far!"

Tato considered it,
trying to think it out. "Maybe if you come over and help me, Elk Boy. We'll both jump on his head
and our combined weight ought to . . ."

Natchez was so
angry he rose up of his own volition, his back creaking like a skeleton falling on a tin
roof.

"You got me angry
now! A dead Indian is not a good Indian! My vengeful spirit is going to break your noses!" roared
the old man.

"At least he admits
he's dead now," said Elk Boy.

"He's a hard man to
convince," said Tato.

Natchez was
outraged. "I am not convinced!"

"Let's discuss it.
I am willing to discuss it," said Tato.

"That's very Indian
of you," observed Elk Boy.

Natchez pulled out
a knife. He leaped at the two young men and stabbed Tato in the chest. Tato looked surprised and
then fell down and looked dead because he was.

Natchez waved the
knife in the air defiantly. "Now who's the dead one?"

Elk Boy looked at
the old man, then looked down at the still body of Tato. He seemed puzzled.

"Well, I have to
admit. Tato
looks
a lot more dead than you do," admitted Elk Boy.

"That's because
he's dead and I'm alive."

Elk Boy shrugged.
"Hard to say if he is dead or not. Maybe it was just something he ate."

Natchez pointed to
the nothingness in the distance. "Why don't we pick up Tato and carry him to the burying
ground?"

"It seems
reasonable," said Elk Boy and they picked him up, cradling him in the same way Natchez had been
carried.

They began walking
across the vast empty spaces.

The dead body was
heavy and it made the journey hard.

"He really looks
dead," said Elk Boy. "How is it, old man, that you know who's dead and who isn't?"

"I am old and have
death always on my tongue. I know the taste. Not quite as refreshing as cold beer but a taste all
the same. And you . . . you are young ... as young as I once was . . . and the young do not
understand death."

Tato stirred in
their arms, opening his eyes.

"I'm not dead,"
said Tato.

They dropped him on
the ground.

The old man and the
young man stood over the body of Tato. He stared up at them with the beginning of a smile on his
face.

Elk Boy picked up a
huge rock, lifted it over his head and then swung. It crashed down on Tato's head, killing him
instantly.

The old man and the
young man bent over and picked up their dead burden again. They began the long weary march to the
grave.

"By the way," said
Natchez, "why did you hit him with that rock?"

Elk Boy kept his
face into the wind. Under his breath he muttered, "Sometimes you just get tired of life being . .
. one big argument."

They had arrived at
nowhere.

The white relatives
were taking great care to be gentle with her because they were exceedingly tolerant.

Delicacy was the
word of the hour because her heart beat weakly in her breast like a dying hummingbird and more
impor­tantly, because the news of Bound Woman's husband's death meant that they all stood to
inherit a lot of money.

In the Stanhope
family, a lot of money could spawn a good deal of gracious behavior.

Barrett Townsend
Stanhope had been killed in a plane crash. His widow, Bound Woman, was a full-blooded Indian,
Barrett's only retained eccentricity from the wild, gold-mining days that had brought all the
Stanhopes wealth and position.

Bound Woman was not
a well woman. Too sudden a shock might kill her, so her doctor had advised.

She sat on the
daybed, dark eyes almost buried in her wrinkled face. She seemed upset by the number of people
clustered around her. She hated a fuss.

Besides that, she
seldom saw the other Stanhopes. They were always cordial. Her husband's money guaranteed that,
but at the same time, they were never there either.

"Who died?" asked
Bound Woman.

"My dear woman,"
said Amanda Stanhope, one of Barrett's nieces. "What makes you think somebody has
died?"

"Vultures!" said
Bound Woman. "That's the only time you ever come around."

Amanda paled, then
her face reddened as the insult went home. So much for tact and diplomacy. She had been giving
considered hints that revealed in half concealing. Apparently, (he effort had been wasted on the
old woman.

Doctor Maddsen held
her hand. "I'm afraid it's Barrett. The
authorities have notified us that his Learjet crashed on a cliff above Morro Bay. No one
could have survived the crash."

He took her pulse,
fearing the worst. Bound Woman was in very frail health. Severe shock could shatter her
heart.

Bound Woman's head
dropped forward. Her eyes filled with tears and she wept unashamedly. Doctor Maddsen resisted the
impulse to put his arm around her.

The relatives,
Stanhopes young and old, had resisted that same impulse all their lives. They stood aloof from
her, silently but distantly approving, waiting for the storm of grief to sub­side. After all, she
was mourning the passing of one of their own. Bound Woman turned her head, looking past them,
looking toward the window, tears still streaking her face. She could see into the cactus garden
she had planted to remind her of the land of her people so unlike this place, and it comforted
her. "It was good of you all to come," said Bound Woman. "Nonsense," said Amanda. "You're family
after all." Bound Woman shook her head no.

"I had to pretend
to be, you mean, for Barrett's sake," she said. "But I was never a member of this
family."

"But of course you
are," cried Amanda. Others offered like demurrers.

"Get the hell out
of here!" said Bound Woman with some show of fury.

Doctor Maddsen
regarded his charge with real concern. "Perhaps it would be best if you would all go. She's had a
very hard time of it. She needs to rest."

The Stanhopes
turned and left, muttering under their collec­tive breaths certain less than kind sentiments
about Bound Woman. Doctor Maddsen patted her gently on her arm and also rose to go. "Try to get
some sleep. I'll look in on you later before I go."

She stared out the
window, giving no sign that she had even heard him.

As she stared at
the garden, the beginning of a smile started on her face. Above the garden, she saw the
good-tasting breath of summer rain in the sky. It wasn't the cactus garden she saw and the dead
dreams she had chased in it, but Black Horse Mesa where the wind of her childhood blew, wild and
strange, from a
dwelling at the center
of the earth. She heard the drummers calling the young men and women out of their hogans. She
heard the bone-whistle flutes and little hand-tamed birds flew in an old twilight ocean of
long-ago nights.

She was like a
child, toothless and wrinkled, with everything and nothing before her. It was all over now that
Barrett was dead; whatever her life with him had been, it was gone.

Even as she stared
at the skeletal shapes of the cacti in her garden, she sensed a change in them. As if they had
lost purpose and meaning, their roots torn from the earth by a flash flood of mistaken memory. So
clearly now, the garden which had always comforted her with a semblance of native land seemed
alien now, the sickly flowering buds flesh white like the pulpy fingers of dead men.

Why should I feel
comforted by a reminder that I am not on my native land? The garden was betrayal, an arrow of
longing for a distant shore.

And she abandoned
it, the cruel garden of twisted, impaling shapes, just as she now abandoned kinship with the
Stanhopes, once and for all time.

Bound Woman felt
something new stirring in the wind out there above the garden.

Had she tended the
soil to raise green things that mocked her with death? Had she grown a desert woven out of her
heart and the remembered heartland of her people, and was that all that remained of life for her
to look at? No. The word was a fever, it was a move through darkness to the stars.

Dreams long
forgotten caught fire and burned in the cookfire. She took the Stanhopes one by one, stacked each
log of them on the fire, and warmed herself over their flaming corpses.

She remembered a
child-woman dream of an obscene bird of night, a starveling, gaunt feathered shape. The obscene,
blood-beaked bird that revealed the emptiness of all white men's faces, pale and white like snow
in a land that has never known it.

As a child, the
bird of night had been an omen and a totem that had guided her terrified child steps away from
the pale-laced ones.

What terrible force
had killed the dream warning of the night bird?

She had thrown her
heart at strangers not born of the land, at that special one she had loved and now lost, Barrett,
who si­lenced totems with love, murdered omens with a caress.

Truly the bird had
died.

But now it seemed
to be in the air once again, hovering over the upraised arms of the cacti in her garden. The
growing things of her garden seemed like dead men pointing their bones at the sky. And the garden
with each sharp spiny needle of knowledge, which seemed to know the coming from tale of her life,
now seemed as dead as the land that held the ashes of her people.

When what she had
become was undone, what was left?

Nothing and then
death?

No. Something
else.

Something was
coming for her. Something that would at lasi be hers. It was a strangeness and a familiarity,
unnamable, like a forbidden taste.

Still it called to
her, made the blood sing in racing warmth in her tired old body, which a white man had once
loved.

It was in the sky
and it moved in the four sacred directions. Bound Woman held up her arms to it, but the roof
overhead prevented that.