The Endischee girl, her hair arranged as the hair of White Shell Girl had been arranged by the Holy People, collected her jewelry from the blanket, put it on, and left the hogan shyly aware that all eyes were upon her.
In beauty it is finished, the big man sang. In beauty it is finished.
Leaphorn stood, waiting his turn to join the single file exiting through the hogan doorway.
The space was filled with the smell of sweat, wool, earth and piñon smoke from the fire outside. The audience crowded around the blanket, collecting their newly blessed belongings. A middle-aged woman in a pants suit picked up a bridle; a teen-age boy wearing a black felt reservation hat took a small slab of turquoise stone and a red plastic floating battery lantern stenciled Haas; an old man wearing a striped denim Santa Fe Railroad cap picked up a flour sack containing God knows what. Leaphorn ducked through the doorway. Mixed with the perfume of the piñon smoke there now came the smell of roasting mutton.
He felt both hungry and relaxed. He would eat, and then he would ask around about a man with gold-rimmed glasses and an oversized dog, and then he would resume his conversation with Listening Woman. His mind had started working again, finding a hint of a pattern in what had been only disorder. He would simply chat with Mrs. Cigarette, giving her a chance to know him better. By tomorrow he wanted her to know him well enough even to risk discussing that dangerous subject no wise Navajo would discuss with a stranger witchcraft.
The wind died away with evening. The sunset had produced a great flare of fluorescent orange from the still-dusty atmosphere. Leaphorn had eaten mutton ribs, and fry bread, and talked to a dozen people, and learned nothing useful. He had talked with Margaret Cigarette again, getting her to recreate as well as she remembered the sequence of events that led up to the Tso Atcitty deaths, but he had learned little he hadn’t already known from the FBI report and the tape recording. And nothing he learned seemed helpful. Anna Atcitty had not wanted to drive Mrs. Cigarette to her appointment with Hosteen Tso, and Mrs. Cigarette believed that was because she wanted to meet a boy.
Mrs. Cigarette wasn’t sure of the boys identity but suspected he was a Salt Cedar Dinee who worked at Short Mountain. A dust devil had blown away some of the pollen which Mrs. Cigarette used in her professional procedure. Mrs. Cigarette had not, as Leaphorn had assumed, done her listening in the little cul-de-sac worn in the mesa cliff just under where Leaphorn had stood looking down on the Tso hogan. Leaphorn had guessed about that, knowing from the FBI report only that she bad gone to a sheltered place against the cliff out of sight of the hogan; he had presumed she had been led by Anna Atcitty to the closest such place. But Mrs. Cigarette remembered walking along a goat trail to reach the sand-floored cul-de-sac where she had listened. And she thought it was at least one hundred yards from the hogan, which meant it was another, somewhat smaller drainage cut in the mesa cliff west of where Leaphorn had stood. Leaphorn remembered he had looked down into it and had noticed it had once been fenced off as a holding pen for sheep.
None of these odds and ends seemed to hold any promise, though sometime after midnight Leaphorn learned that the child who had reported seeing the dark bird dive into an arm of Lake Powell was one of the Gorman boys. The boy was attending the Kinaalda, but had left with two of his cousins to refill the Endischee water barrels. That involved a round trip of more than twelve miles and the wagon probably wouldn’t be back before dawn. The boys name was Eddie. He was the boy in the black hat and it turned out he wouldn’t be back at all after loading the water barrels; he was going to Farmington.
Leaphorn sat through the night-long ceremonial, singing the twelve Hogan Songs, and the Songs of the Talking God, and watching sympathetically the grimly determined efforts of the Endischee girl not to break the rules by falling asleep. When the sky was pink in the east he had joined the others and chanted the Dawn Song, remembering the reverence with which his grandfather had always used it to greet each new day. The words, down through the generations, had become so melded into the rhythm that they were hardly more than musical sounds. But Leaphorn remembered the meaning.
Below the East, she has discovered it,
Now she has discovered Dawn Boy,
The child now he has come upon it,
Where it was resting he has come upon it,
Now he talks to it, now it listens to him.
Since it listens to him, it obeys him;
Since it obeys him, it grants him beauty.
From the mouth of Dawn Boy, beauty comes forth.
Now the child will have life of everlasting beauty.
Now the child will go with beauty before it,
Now the child will go with beauty all around it,
Now the child will be with beauty finished
Then the Endischee girl had gone, trailed again by cousins, and nieces and nephews, to run the final race of Kinaalda. The sun had come up and Leaphorn thought he’d try once more to talk to Mrs. Cigarette. She was sitting in her truck, its door open, listening to those who were about to remove the Kinaalda cake from the fire pit.
Leaphorn sat down beside her. One thing still troubles me, he said. You told the FBI man, and you have told me, that the man who was killed said that sand paintings were spoiled.
Sand paintings. More than one of the dry paintings. How could that be?
I don’t know, Mrs. Cigarette said.
Do you know of any sing that has more than one sand painting at a time? Leaphorn asked. Is there any singer anywhere on the reservation who does it a different way?
They all do it the same way, if they do it the way the Talking God taught them to make dry paintings.
That’s what my grandfather taught me, Leaphorn said. The proper one is made, and when the ceremonial is finished, the singer wipes it out, and the sand is mixed together and carried out of the hogan, and scattered back to the wind. That’s the way I was taught.
Yes, Margaret Cigarette said.
Then, old mother, could it have been that you did not understand what the man who was your patient said to you? Could he have said one sand painting was spoiled?
Mrs. Cigarette turned her face from the place where the Endischees had scraped away the hot cinders, and had brushed away a layer of ashes, and were now preparing to lift the Kinaalda cake from its pit oven. Her eyes focused directly on Leaphorns face; as directly as if she could see him.
No, she said. I thought I heard him wrong. And I said so. And he said . . . She paused, recalling it. He said, No, not just one holy painting. More than one. He said it was strange, and then he wouldn’t talk any more about it.
Very strange, Leaphorn said. The only place he knew of that a bona fide singer had produced genuine dry paintings to be preserved was at the Museum of Navajo Ceremonial Art in Santa Fe. There it had been done only after much soul-searching and argument, and only after certain elements had been slightly modified. The argument for breaking the rules had been to preserve certain paintings so they would never be lost.
Could that be the answer here? Had Standing Medicine found a way to leave sand paintings so a ceremony would be preserved for posterity? Leaphorn shook his head.