“I am not finished with my lesson with the Old One yet,” I confessed.
“I know,” she said.
“Momma Anna, I have asked a couple people for forgiveness now. Both times, I felt… I don’t know… ashamed, I guess. Like I had done something terrible and I really needed forgiveness. But I don’t know what I’ve done that would make me feel that way.”
The old Pueblo woman pressed her lips together until they almost disappeared. She seemed to be thinking about what to say to me.
I knew to remain quiet and allow the silence to blossom between us. Sharing silence is a form of both intimacy and respect to the Tanoah, and they often measure someone they meet by how much silence the newcomer can tolerate.
“You ask Old One,” Momma Anna said.
I thought for a moment about this. Then, suddenly, I had another idea. “Momma Anna, if I have done anything to hurt or offend you, I ask your forgiveness.”
The elder smiled at me, and light from the window twinkled on the surface of one of her eyes. “I forgive you,” she said. “Maybe you need forgive you.”
I was so tired when I got to my cabin that I wedged a chair under the doorknob of my front door and hurried to change into sweats. I went directly to bed for a nap, placing my pistol under my pillow once more and the shotgun on the floor-just under the edge of the bed where I could reach it. It had been a long week full of strange events, odd hours, and little sleep. I held the Old One up between my fingers to look at it while I lay on my pillow. “What are you trying to teach me?” I said aloud, turning it this way and that, as if the answer might be on the stone itself. I tucked it in the pocket of my sweatpants and closed my eyes.
I must have dozed off instantly. When I woke, I felt groggy and hungover, and I had drooled on my pillow. I propped myself up against the aspen log headboard, still drowsy and unable to prod myself fully awake. The sun was low outside and my cabin was in the shadow of the mountain now-I could see the fading sky out the window near my bed. The gray semidarkness inside the house made everything seem fuzzy and out of focus. Within seconds, just as if a trapdoor had opened beneath me, I dropped deep into a memory-one that had held itself in perfect waiting for a time like this, when I let down my guard:
I am twelve. It is early spring in western Kansas; the days are growing longer and the weather warmer. A boy named Skip has been flirting with me all week at school.
“Want to see our new foal?” he asks on the bus home.
“I have chores to do. My dad is expecting me.”
“You can hop off the bus with me, I’ll show you the foal, and then I can drive you home on my four-wheeler. I bet we can get you home before the bus gets to your road.”
We have fun talking and teasing while we look at the new foal. Somehow, an hour passes before we realize it. I panic. “I have to get home. My dad will be worried.”
We hurry to get me home, taking a cross-country path on his four-wheeler. When we drive up to my house, I tell Skip to let me off at the road. I pretend to be lighthearted, smiling and waving as he drives away, but I dread seeing my father. I know I am in trouble.
He isn’t in the house or in the barn. I think maybe I am home free, that he is working in the fields and doesn’t know I have come home late. I change out of my school dress and into my chore clothes. I walk out to the field he has been clearing in the back forty. I see the tractor and the big green brush-hogger behind it turned on its side. I start running. I run as fast as I can, and as I draw near, I see boots and denim-clad legs sticking out from under the back of the tractor. “Daddy!” I scream. “Daddy!” The rotary mower has careened into the side of the tractor, and I have to run to the other side to see underneath. I slide into place beside his head and find that his body is pinned between the machines. He needs help.
I look around, frantic, trying to decide what to do. And then I see it. Three feet away, like a fat blue snake, an arm lies in the dirt, a dark stain in the earth where the blood has drained from it.
I hear the engine of the tractor, still running. The motor is making a knocking sound. A pounding sound. Someone is pounding…
“Jamaica! Jamaica! Jamaica, are you all right?” Roy’s voice called from the other side of the door, his fist thumping demandingly on the thick wood slab. I hoisted myself out of bed feeling like I weighed a thousand pounds. I staggered to the door, removed the chair, and swung the door open.
“Jamaica! For Christ’s sake, I’ve been banging on this door and yelling for you for five minutes! I thought we were going to have to get a medic out here. Boy, you look like you’ve been drug through a knothole. Are you all right?”
“Yeah, give me a minute. I took a nap and… I guess I wasn’t quite awake. I got up too fast. I need to sit down.” I turned and walked back to my big chair and carefully lowered myself into it. I laid my head back and looked up at the ceiling, waiting for the room to stop spinning.
The Boss stood in the doorway. I knew he probably didn’t want to come into my cabin, but I couldn’t have stood at the door any longer, and I wasn’t sure I could get up and move now even if there was free land involved.
“Well, your being sick kind of changes things, but I don’t really know how to sort it out yet. Jerry Padilla called me at home and said he wanted to talk with you. He couldn’t find a phone number for you, and wanted to know how to find you, said he needs to question you. I told him you didn’t have a phone, but I would have you meet him at the BLM at seventeen hundred hours. He won’t tell me what it’s about. Do you want me to tell him you’re sick and can’t come?”
I sat up straight in the chair. “No, Boss, I’ll be fine. I’m not sick, just tired. I’ll get changed in just a second, and I’ll come.”
When I got to the BLM, Deputy Sheriff Jerry Padilla was waiting in the lobby. I asked him to come to the employee break room with me and I started a pot of coffee.
“Man, you look worn out. You getting any sleep?” he asked.
“No, I haven’t had much sleep this week.”
“Well, drinking coffee this late in the day isn’t going to help.”
“You’re probably right. My timing stinks. I’m trying to wake up so I can talk to you, but I need to go home right after this and go to bed. I guess I won’t have any coffee after all. Do you want some?”
“Sure, I’ll have a cup. Listen, there’s a new twist. We have a positive I.D. on the body that went over the bridge on the cross on Wednesday. Hey, you probably ought to sit down, Jamaica; you don’t look so good.”
I took a chair.
“It’s a priest, guy we think you might know, name is Father Ignacio Medina.”
“Father Ignacio? But-no! How can he…”
Jerry sat quietly and didn’t speak, watching me.
I grabbed the front of my shirt and wadded up a fistful of the cloth. “I can’t believe…” I felt short of air. “My book…”
“This the priest that was helping you with your book?”
I nodded my head. I felt like I should cry, anything, but I was going numb inside instead.
Jerry continued to watch me. After a minute or so, he reached in his pocket and took out his notebook. He opened it on the table and thumbed to a page filled with writing in black ink. Then he looked up at me again. “The reason I wanted to talk to you is to find out why you were trying to reach him at the Indian school in Santa Fe on Thursday afternoon.”