“C
OUSIN BARBARA TOLD ME SHE WOULD BRING DUSTY AND Maureen out at sunrise, Aunt,” Maggie Walking Hawk Taylor said. Tall and slender, she had a round face, with short black hair. “They shouldn’t be too far behind us.”
“Okay,” Sage Walking Hawk said weakly.
Sage propped her cane and took another step. The cool predawn breeze fluttered the hood of her yellow coat and blew wispy gray hair around her deeply wrinkled face. She made soft pained sounds as she climbed the trail. She’d had trouble with her balance since a car accident more than ten years ago. Sometimes she walked fine, other times she staggered like a drunk.
Maggie used both hands to steady her great-aunt’s elbow. With each step, the folding lawn chair she carried over her left elbow patted against her hip. It was a cool autumn morning, the temperature around fifty degrees. The faded blue jeans and denim shirt she wore barely kept the cold at bay.
They walked along the western wall of the ancient pueblo toward the circular structure at the top of the hill. The glow of dawn poured through the towering cottonwoods, scattering their path with pale blue diamonds.
Sage stopped and blinked her cataract-covered eyes at the ground while she breathed. She was trembling.
Maggie’s grip tightened on her great-aunt’s arm. She had promised herself that when this ordeal was over, she would go sit on a mesa top somewhere and give her grief free rein. But not today. If she broke down today, it would make this last morning harder for her aunt.
“Does this seem like the place you saw in your dream, Aunt?”
Sage nodded. “Yes.”
To their right, a wall of finely fitted tan sandstone blocks rose fifteen
feet into the air. A broad band of green stone ran along the base of the wall, but it looked black in the predawn light.
The Chaco Anasazi had abandoned the giant walled town in the twelfth century. Two generations later, a new group of Anasazi had reoccupied it. The later “Mesa Verde” occupants sealed several entryways, converted many living rooms into storage chambers, latrines, and burial rooms. Though the Chaco Anasazi had carried their trash outside, the Mesa Verdeans used interior rooms for trash dumps, packing them floor to ceiling with garbage. The Mesa Verdeans had done everything they could to minimize the need to venture outside the pueblo’s protective walls. The warfare was so intense that by about A.D. 1275, the pueblo had been abandoned again.
Sage turned to look westward where a few of the brightest stars still sparkled. “I flew over it in my dream.” The words came haltingly, puffed more than spoken. “But I think this is it. Where’s the Sun Room?”
“The way you described it, it sounded to me like one of the tri-walled structures, Aunt. There’s one up the hill.”
Only twelve of the mysterious circular structures had been discovered in America, and three were at Aztec Ruins in New Mexico. They consisted of two rings of rooms around a central chamber.
“Up there?” Sage pointed a crooked finger. “It’s up there?”
“Yes, Aunt.”
Sage nodded and took a deep breath.
“Aunt, do you need to sit down for a while?” Maggie started to slip the lawn chair from her elbow.
“No, child. Thank you.” Sage clutched Maggie’s arm. “I want to go see if he’s there.”
Maggie frowned. “He? Who do you mean?”
Maggie supported her aunt as she hobbled up the slight incline past the numbered interpretive markers. An orchard filled the hollow to their left, and a modern farmhouse sat against the hills just beyond the tri-walled structure. The scents of dew-soaked brush and damp stone filled the air.
Sage stumbled, and Maggie gasped, “Aunt? Are you all right?”
Sage patted Maggie’s hand. “I’m just clumsy this morning. Your grandmother would have said she tripped on a ghost rock, a rock that was here when the ghosts were alive. But I think maybe I’m just not
as light on my feet as I used to be. I never have been able to step into other worlds like she could.”
Maggie squeezed her aunt’s sticklike arm. The elderly woman resembled a tiny hunchbacked skeleton. In the past year she had shrunk in size, and her skin had turned shiny and translucent, as though the cancer had eaten away her muscles and bones.
Sage said, “The man in my dream, he was calling to me from inside a tower.”
“Well, there’s nothing left up here but rings of stones on the ground, but it was a tower once. What did the man say?”
Sage shook her gray head. “I couldn’t make out his words. It sounded like he was talking with a mouthful of cooked squash.”
Sage took three steps, breathed, then took two more steps, forcing herself up the hill. As sunrise neared, a purple halo arced over the eastern horizon, and the rolling hills turned the deep rich shade of thunderheads.
Sage stopped, breathing hard, to survey the opening to the tri-walled structure—a break in the outer ring. Interpretive marker number five stood in front of them. The walls were clearly visible as three concentric rings of stones.
Sage lifted a shaking hand and pointed to the opposite side of the structure. “There. That’s where his voice was coming from.”
Sage turned right and started to walk around the circumference of the structure. Maggie hurried to grab her arm to help steady her steps. When they had made it almost halfway around, Sage suddenly shivered and leaned on Maggie.
“What is it, Aunt?”
Sage bowed her head. For a few seconds, she didn’t speak. “Don’t you feel him? The desperation? The sadness?”
Maggie frowned at the tall golden grass that filled the spaces between the stone rings. She tried to open her souls to the “other” world, but felt only the cool morning breeze tousling her short black hair. Every elderly woman in Maggie’s family could touch the Spirit World. Her grandmother had been known as “She Who Haunts the Dead.” Aunt Hail had been called “Ghost Talker,” and her aunt Sage was known as “Empty Eyes,” because of the way she looked when she was listening to ghost voices. The talent had apparently missed Maggie’s generation. Oh, she’d had a few strange experiences, particularly
around ancient ruins, and there were times when she sensed something roaming the darkness, but she couldn’t say it was a ghost. It might just as well have been a hungry coyote.
Headlights came up the road in front of the Aztec Ruins Interpretive Center, and Maggie heard the low roar of an engine.
“That must be Barbara, with Dusty and Maureen.”
Sage looked up. “Hmm? Did you hear something?”
“Yes, Aunt,” Maggie half-shouted so she would hear. “A car engine. I saw lights, too.”
“They’re early,” Sage said, and smiled. “Go on. Go meet them. I’ll be fine here by myself. I need to do some talking in private.”
Maggie unfolded the lawn chair and set it up on the flattest place she could find. “Let me help you sit down first.”
She took Sage’s arm and guided her to the seat. Sage sank down wearily. Her clawlike fingers curled over the chair arms. “Remind Barbara to bring the cornmeal.”
“I will, Aunt.” Maggie bent and kissed Sage’s forehead, then trotted back down the trail.
When Magpie disappeared behind the giant pueblo, Sage looked down at the stone rings. They had a blurry silver glow, as did the blades of grass that swayed and nodded in the breeze.
“Well,” she whispered. “I’m here. Why did you call me?” Whimpers eddied around her, but it might just have been the wind. She could no longer tell for sure. Each time the doctors gave her chemotherapy, she lost more of herself. The last bout had wounded her souls. She could feel her breath-heart soul—the soul that kept her heart beating and her lungs moving—hanging around her like a ragged old sun-bleached cloth, while her other soul huddled somewhere deep inside, eager to sleep.
From her right, the place she’d seen the man standing in her dream, the feeling of sadness swelled, as though it upset the ghost that Sage couldn’t hear him as well as he’d expected she would be able to.
“You’ll just have to speak louder,” she said, and smoothed her arthritic hands over her yellow coat.
She hadn’t wanted to take the radiation or chemotherapy. She’d been longing to get out of her sick body for over a year, but Magpie had pleaded with her to try the treatments. Sage loved her great-niece with all her heart. She would have walked through a den of
rattlesnakes if it would have made Magpie smile for just a few seconds. Sage had swallowed the poisons and survived much longer than her doctors had predicted. But all the pain and anguish was finally coming to an end. Yesterday, the doctor told her he wanted her in the hospital this afternoon.
Sage gazed out at the orchard. They looked like apple trees, planted in rows. High above them, clouds sailed through the brightening morning sky.
Sage offered a silent prayer of thanks to the
Shiwana
, the Spirits of the dead who had climbed into the sky to become cloud beings. They watched over the living, and brought the blessed rains.
“Are you up there, Slumber? Hail?”
Her sisters, Slumber and Hail, had died a few years ago from the same cancer that was killing Sage. It would give them something to talk about when her sisters came to get her. If Sage could get a word in edgewise. Slumber had been a real talker. Hail had told her once that Slumber could talk a dead rabbit away from a starving weasel.
Sage chuckled, remembering the irritated expression on Slumber’s face.
Voices drifted up from the Interpretive Center, and Sage twisted around to look. Barbara and Magpie walked side-by-side, holding onto each other affectionately as they approached Sage.
She smiled. Funny how at the end of life nothing a person had done mattered. Not the things they’d owned, or built. The only things Sage counted were the people she loved. Everything else in the past eighty years had been leaves tumbling in the wind.
A child’s voice …
Sage turned her good ear toward the tri-walled structure.
“What’s wrong?” she asked in concern. “Are you here with the tall man?”
The whispers turned to cries, muted, breathless, as though they strained against tightly closed lips.
“It’s all right, child. I’m here. I won’t let anyone hurt you if I can stop him.”
Magpie and Barbara stopped in front of the tri-walled structure with a blond man, and a woman with a long black braid. Magpie said, “Aunt Sage, I want you to meet Dusty Stewart and Dr. Maureen Cole.”
As they walked around the ring of stones, Sage saw it, glowing like a sickly green light around Dusty Stewart. The woman, however, was
surrounded by a beautiful blue glow. It fluttered around her like concerned hands.
“Good morning,” Sage said. “I see the ghosts haven’t got you.”
“Yet,” Dusty answered, and glanced around uncomfortably. He knelt in front of Sage and said, “Thank you, Elder, for helping us today.”
“I haven’t fixed anything yet,” she said. “You’d better wait to see what happens.”
Dusty nodded and backed away.
Maureen knelt in Dusty’s place. “Good morning, Elder.” She pulled a necklace over her head and gently placed it in Sage’s fingers, then she closed her own fingers around Sage’s. “This is a gift from my people, the Seneca. It was blessed by our elders. I hope it brings you luck.”
Sage opened her trembling hand and looked at the beautifully carved tortoise fetish. She smiled and touched Maureen’s cheek. “It’s beautiful, child. What’s your real name? The name your people call you?”
“Washais,” Maureen said, and explained, “it’s a drawknife that my people use to carve sacred masks.”
Sage stroked Maureen’s face. “I’m going to free you, child.” She gestured to the Sun Room. “I want you and Dusty to take off everything metal and go sit in the middle ring there. No watches, no silver buttons, no change in your pockets. Kind of like being at the airport.”
Magpie had warned them, so they’d both worn sweat pants and sweatshirts, but they sat down to remove their coats and boots.
Sage waved a frail hand to Magpie and Barbara. “Keep the metal outside the circles.”
“Yes, Aunt Sage,” they said almost in unison, picked up the coats and boots, and hauled them a short distance away.
Short and pudgy, with a big nose, Barbara had a round moony face that always seemed to glow with happiness. As she came closer, Sage could make out her red shirt and blue jeans.
Barbara kissed her on top of the head, and said, “Good morning, Aunt Sage.”
“Hello, Barbara. Thank you for bringing Dusty and Maureen out to me. Did you remember the bags of cornmeal?”
Barbara pulled four tiny leather bags from her pocket and placed them in Sage’s hand. “They’re right here, just as you asked.”
Sage fingered them, looking down to make sure she could tell the colors apart: blue, red, white, and yellow. Yes, she was going to be able to do this, just like Magpie wanted. The knowledge made her feel better. She couldn’t do much of anything anymore. Not even for herself. But she still knew the sacred ways.