McGinnis grinned. And if anybody heard anything, it’d get to old John McGinnis. That right? The grin vanished with a new thought. Say, now, you know anything about a feller named Noni? Claims to be a Seminole Indian? The tone of the question suggested that he doubted all claims made by Noni.
Don’t think so, Leaphorn said. What about him?
He came in here a while back and looked the store over, McGinnis said. Said he and a bunch of other goddam Indians had some sort of government loan and was interested in buying this hell hole. I figured to do that they’d have to deal with the Tribal Council for a license.
They would, Leaphorn said. But that wouldn’t have anything to do with the police. They really going to buy it? The idea of McGinnis actually selling the Short Mountain Post wasn’t believable. It would be like the Tribal Council bricking up the hole in Window Rock, or Arizona selling the Grand Canyon.
Probably didn’t really have the money, McGinnis said. Probably just come around looking to see if breaking in and stealing would be easy. I didn’t like his looks. McGinnis scowled at his drink and at the memory. He put his rocking chair in motion, holding his elbow rigid on the chair arm and the glass rigid in his hand. In it, a brown tide of bourbon ebbed and flowed with the motion. This Tso killing, now. You know what I hear about that? He waited for Leaphorn to fill in the blank.
What? Leaphorn asked.
Not a goddam thing, McGinnis said.
Funny, Leaphorn said.
It sure as hell is, McGinnis said. He stared at Leaphorn as if trying to find some sort of answer in his face. You know what I think? I don’t think a Navajo did it.
Don’t you?
Neither do you, McGinnis said. Not if you’ve got as much sense as I hear you do. You Navajos will steal if you think you can get off with something, but I never heard of one going out to kill somebody. He flourished the glass to emphasize the point.
That’s one kind of white mans meanness the Navajos never took to. Any killings you have, there’s either getting drunk and doing it, or getting mad and fighting. You don’t have this planning in advance and going out to kill somebody like white folks. That right?
Leaphorn let his silence speak for him. McGinnis had been around Navajos long enough for that. What the trader had said was true. Among the traditional Dinee, the death of a fellow human being was the ultimate evil. He recognized no life after death. That which was natural in him, and therefore good, simply ceased. That which was unnatural, and therefore evil, wandered through the darkness as a ghost, disturbing nature and causing sickness. The Navajo didn’t share the concept of his Hopi-Zuni-Pueblo Indian neighbors that the human spirit transcended death in the fulfillment of an eternal kachina, nor the Plains Indian belief in joining with a personal God. In the old tradition, death was unrelieved horror. Even the death of an enemy in battle was something the warrior cleansed himself of with an Enemy Way ritual. Unless, of course, a Navajo Wolf was involved. Witchcraft was a reversal of the Navajo Way.
Except maybe if somebody thought he was a Navajo Wolf, McGinnis said. They’d kill him if they thought he was a witch.
You hear of anyone who thought that?
That’s the trouble, McGinnis said cheerfully. Nobody had nothing but good words to say about old Hosteen Tso. The cluttered room was silent again while McGinnis considered this oddity. He stirred his drink with a pencil from his shirt pocket.
What do you know about his family? Leaphorn asked.
He had a boy, Tso did. Just one kid. That boy wasn’t no good. They called him Ford.
Married some girl over at Teec Nos Pos, a Salt Cedar I think she was, and moved over with her people and got to drinking and whoring around at Farmington until her folks run him off. Ford was always fighting and stealing and raising hell. McGinnis sipped at his bourbon, his face disapproving. You could understand it if somebody hit that Navajo on the head, he said.
He ever come back? Leaphorn asked.
Never did, McGinnis said. Died years ago. In Gallup I heard it was. Probably too much booze and his liver got him. He toasted this frailty with a sip of bourbon.
You know anything about a grandson? Leaphorn asked.
McGinnis shrugged. You know how it is with Navajos, he said. The man moves in with his wife’s outfit and if there’s any kids they’re born into their mothers clan. If you want to know anything about Tsos grandson, you’re going to have to drive to Teec Nos Pos and start asking around among them Salt Cedar people. I never even heard Ford had any children until old Hosteen Tso come in here a while before he got killed and told me he wanted to write this letter to his grandson. McGinnis’s face creased with remembered amusement. I told him I didn’t know he had a grandson, and he said that made two things I don’t know about him and of course I asked him what the other one was and he said it was which hand he used to wipe himself. McGinnis chuckled and sipped his bourbon. Witty old fart, he said.
What did he say in the letter?
I didn’t write it, McGinnis said. But lets see what I can remember about it. He come in one day. It was colder'n a wedge. Musta been early in March. He asked me what I charged to write a letter and I told him it was free for regular customers. And he started-telling me what he wanted to tell this grandson and would I send the letter to him and of course I asked him where this boy lived and he said it was way off east somewhere with nothing but white people. And I told him he’d have to know more than that for me to know what to write on the front of the envelope.
Yeah, Leaphorn said. When a marriage broke up in the matriarchal Navajo system, it wouldn’t be unusual for paternal grandparents to lose track of children. They would be members of their mothers family. Ever hear anything about Fords wife?
McGinnis rubbed his bushy white eyebrow with a thumb, stimulating his memory. I think I heard she was a drunk, too. Another no-good. Works that way a lot. Birds of a feather.
McGinnis interrupted himself suddenly by slapping the arm of the rocker. By God, he said.
I just thought of something. Way back, must have been almost twenty years ago, there was a kid staying with Hosteen Tso. Stayed there a year or so. Helped with the sheep and all. I bet that was the grandbaby.
Maybe, Leaphorn said. If his mother really was a drunk.
Hard to keep track of Navajo kids, McGinnis said. But I remember hearing that one went off to boarding school at St. Anthony’s. Maybe that’d explain what Hosteen Tso said about him going on the Jesus Road. Maybe them Franciscan priests there turned him Catholic.
There’s something else I want to know about, Leaphorn said. Tso went to a sing not very long before he was killed. You know about that?
McGinnis frowned. There wasn’t no sing. About last March or so? We had all that sorry weather then. Remember? Blowing snow. Wasn’t no sings anywhere on the plateau.
How about a little earlier? Leaphorn asked. January or February?
McGinnis frowned again. There was one a little after Christmas. Girl got sick at Yazzie Springs. Nakai girl. Would have been early in January.
What was it?
They did the Wind Way, McGinnis said. Had to get a singer from all the way over at Many Farms. Expensive as hell.
Any others? Leaphorn asked. The Wind Way was the wrong ritual. The sand painting made for it would include the Corn Beetle, but none of the other Holy People mentioned by Hosteen Tso.
Bad spring for sings, McGinnis said. Everybody’s either getting healthy, or they’re too damn poor to pay for em.
Leaphorn grunted. There was something he needed to connect. They sat. McGinnis moved the glass in small, slow circles which spun the bourbon to within a centimeter of its rim. Leaphorn let his eyes drift. It was a big room, two high windows facing east and two facing west. Someone, years ago, had curtained them with a cotton print of roses on a blue background. Big as the room was, its furniture crowded it. In the corner, a double bed covered with quilts; beside it a worn 1940-modern sofa; beyond that, a recliner upholstered in shiny blue vinyl; two other nondescript overstuffed chairs; and three assorted chests and cabinets. Every flat surface was cluttered with the odds and ends accumulated in a long lifetime Indian pottery, kachina dolls, a plastic radio, a shelf of books, and even-on one of the window sills-an assortment of flint lance points, artifacts which had interested Leaphorn since his days as an anthropology student at Arizona State. Outside, through the dusty glass window, he saw two young men talking beside one of the trading posts outbuildings. The building was of stone, originally erected, Leaphorn had been told, by a Church of Christ missionary early in McGinnis’s tenure as trader and postmaster. It had been abandoned after the preachers optimism had been eroded by his inability to cause the Dinee to accept the idea that God had a personal and special interest in humans. McGinnis then had partitioned the chapel into three tourist cabins. But, as one of his customers had put it, it was as hard to get white-man tourists to go over that Short Mountain road as it was to get Navajos to go to heaven. The cabins, like the church, had been mostly empty.