The drive from Leaphorn’s office in Window Rock to Lower Greasewood took him westward through the ponderosa forests of the Defiance Plateau, through the piñon-juniper hills which surround Ganado, and then southeast into the sagebrush landscape that falls away into the Painted Desert. At the Lower Greasewood Boarding School those children who lived near enough to be day students were climbing aboard a bus for the trip home. Leaphorn asked the driver where to find the Agnes Tsosie place.
“Twelve miles down to the junction north of Beta Hochee,” the driver said. “And then you turn back south toward White Cone about two miles and take the dirt road past the Na-Ah-Tee trading post, and about three-four miles past that, to your right, there’s a road that leads off toward the backside of Tesihim Butte. That's the road that leads up to Old Lady Tsosie's outfit. About two miles, maybe.”
“Road?” Leaphorn asked.
The driver was a trim young woman of perhaps thirty. She knew exactly what Leaphorn meant. She grinned.
“Well, actually, it’s two tracks out through the sage. But it's easy to find. There's a big bunch of asters blooming along there—right at the top of a slope.”
The junction of the track to the Tsosie place was easy to find. Asters were blooming everywhere along the dirt road past Na-Ah-Tee trading post, but the place where the track led off from the road was also marked by a post which the bus driver hadn’t mentioned. An old boot was jammed atop the post, signaling that somebody would be at home. Leaphorn downshifted and turned down the track. He felt fine. Everything about this business of learning why a dead man had Agnes Tsosie’s name in his pocket was working well.
“I don’t have no idea who that could be,” Agnes Tsosie said. She was reclining, thin, gray haired, propped up by pillows on a metal bed under a brush arbor beside her house, holding a Polaroid photograph of the man with the pointed shoes. She handed it to Jolene Yellow, who was standing beside the sofa. “Daughter, you know this man?”
Jolene Yellow examined the photograph, shook her head, handed the print back to Leaphorn. He had been in the business too long to show disappointment.
“Any idea why some stranger might be coming out here to your Yeibichai?”
“No.” She shook her head. “Not this stranger.”
Not this stranger. Leaphorn thought about that. Agnes Tsosie would explain in good time. Now she was looking away, out across the gentle slope that fell away from Tesihim Butte and then rose gradually toward the sharp dark outline of Nipple Butte to the west. The sage was gray and silver with autumn, the late afternoon sun laced it with slanting shadows, and everywhere there was the yellow of blooming snake-weed and the purple of the asters. Beauty before her, Leaphorn thought. Beauty all around her.
But Agnes Tsosie’s face showed no sign she was enjoying the beauty. It looked strained and sick.
“We have a letter,” Agnes Tsosie said. “It’s in the hogan.” She glanced at Jolene Yellow. “My daughter will get it for you to look at.”
The letter was typed on standard bond paper.
September 13. Dear Mrs. Tsosie:
I read about you in an old issue of National Geographic—the one with the long story about the Navajo Nation. It said you were a member of the Bitter Water Clan, which was also the clan of my grandmother, and I noticed by the picture they had of you that you two look alike. I write to you because I want to ask a favor.
I am one-fourth Navajo by blood. My grandmother told me she was all Navajo, but she married a white man and so did my mother. But I feel I am a Navajo, and I would like to see what can be done about becoming officially a member of the tribe. I would also like to come out to Arizona and talk to you about my family. I remember that my grandmother told me that she herself was the granddaughter of Ganado Mucho and that she was born to the Bitter Water People and that her father’s clan had been the Streams Come Together People.
Please let me know if I can come and visit you and anything you can tell me about how I would become a Navajo.
Sincerely,
Henry Highhawk
I am enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope.
Leaphorn reread the letter, trying to connect these words, this odd plea, with the arrogant face of the man with the pointed shoes.
“Did you answer it?”
“I told him to come,” Agnes Tsosie said. She sighed, shifted her weight, grimaced.
Leaphorn waited.
“I told him there would be a Yeibichai for me after the first frost. Probably late in November. That would be when to come. There would be other Bitter Water People there for him to talk to. I said he could talk to the hataalii who is doing the sing. Maybe it would be proper for him to look through the mask and be initiated like they do with boys on the last night of the sing. I said I didn’t know about that. He would have to ask the hataalii about that. And then he could go to Window Rock and see about whether he could get on the tribal rolls. He could find out from the people there what proof he would need.“
Leaphorn waited. But Agnes Tsosie had said what she had to say.
“Did he answer your letter?”
“Not yet,” she said. “Or maybe he did and his letter is down at Beta Hochee. That’s where we pick up our mail.”
“Nobody has been by the trading post there for a while,” Jolene Yellow said. “Not since last week.”
“Do you think you know who this man’s grandmother was?” Leaphorn asked.
“Maybe,” Agnes Tsosie said. “I remember they said my mother had an aunt who went away to boarding school and never did come back.”
“Anyway,” Jolene Yellow said, “he’s not the same man.”
Leaphorn looked at her, surprised.
“He sent his picture,” she said. “I’ll get it.”
It was about two inches square, a color photograph of the sort taken by machine to be pasted in passports. It showed a long, slender face, large blue eyes, and long blond hair woven into two tight braids. It was a face that would always look boyish.
“He certainly doesn’t look like a Navajo,” Leaphorn said. He was thinking that this Henry Highhawk looked even less like the man with the pointed shoes.
Chapter Four
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From behind him in the medicine hogan, Officer Jim Chee could hear the chanting of the First Dancers as they put on their ceremonial paint. Chee was interested. He had picked a spot from which he could see through the hogan doorway and watch the personifiers preparing themselves. They were eight middle-aged men from around the Naschitti Chapter House in New Mexico, far to the east of Agnes Tsosie’s place below Tesihim Butte. They had painted their right hands first, then their faces from the forehead downward, and then their bodies, making themselves ready to represent the Holy People of Navajo mythology, the yei, the powerful spirits. This Night Chant ceremonial was one that Chee hoped to learn himself someday. Yeibichai, his people called it, naming it for Talking God, the maternal grandfather of all the spirits. The performance was nine days long and involved five complicated sand paintings and scores of songs. Learning it would take a long, long time, as would finding a hataalii willing to take him on as a student. When the time came for that, he would have to take leave from the Navajo Tribal Police. But that was somewhere in the distant future. Now his job was watching for the Flaky Man from Washington. Henry Highhawk was the name on the federal warrant.
“Henry Highhawk,” Captain Largo had said, handing him the folder. “Usually when they decide to turn Indian and call themselves something like Whitecloud, or Squatting Bear, or Highhawk, they decide they’re going to be Cherokees. Or some dignified tribe that everybody knows about. But this jerk had to pick Navajo.”