“You know it’s Lent; next week’s Holy Week. That’s right in the heart of Penitente country. Maybe it’s all those pilgrims going to the Sanctuario in Chimayo. Or maybe it’s thrill seekers looking for a glimpse of some Penitente action.”
“I don’t think so. The pilgrims go the highway, always have. And the gawkers usually don’t show up ’til Good Friday, or the night before. Seems unlikely they’d be looking for much action this early, and even if they were, they’d just take the High Road up through Trampas and Truchas.”
“Well, are you thinking poachers or wood cutting or what? You know, even though it’s the first week of April, the temperature still drops below freezing at night. This time of year, anyone who could provide enough firewood to get folks through until spring could make a fortune.”
“Yeah, well, even though it’s still cold at night, it warms up during the day. As a result, we’ve had enough snowmelt to make all those roads up there muddy and impassable, even with an ATV. I think it’ll take a real good rider, so that’s why I’m sending you. We’re going to work with the Forest Service on this one. I met with one of their rangers today. His name’s Kerry Reed. Have you ever met him?”
“I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure.”
“You’ll like him. I think you two will make a good team. And since you’ve already put in nearly half a shift today, I figured you might as well wait and start tomorrow night. I told Reed that, too.”
“Okay, Boss,” I agreed. I sat up and removed my feet from his desk.
“Oh,” he said, reaching into his vest pocket and pulling out a piece of notepaper on which he had scribbled a few lines. “Almost forgot. Here’s where he’s going to meet you and when. And you two will have to keep any radio traffic to a minimum, not that you can get much signal strength up in that country anyway. But if someone’s up to something, they’ll monitor our radio traffic, so we need to keep things quiet or we’ll never find out what’s going on. Now get on home. You’ve had a tough enough day, no need to hang around here just to pass the time.”
On my way out through the front lobby, Rosa stopped me. “I forgot to tell you before. Some guy called for you. He was asking a lot of questions. He asked for your phone number at home. I told him you don’t have a phone. He wanted to know when he could call you here. I told him I don’t know, you’re not usually here. He said it was personal and he didn’t want to leave a message. You got a new boyfriend?”
“When was this?”
“About an hour before you came in. Sorry, I forgot. I wanted to tell you about that forest ranger guy, and I didn’t think-”
“And he didn’t leave a name?”
“No, I asked, but he didn’t want to leave a message.”
“Did he say he would call back?”
“I don’t think so. I don’t remember.”
“Rosa, you didn’t write anything down?”
“What was I supposed to write down? If the guy don’t want me to know who he is, then I don’t know who he is! I don’t know what to write.”
5
I left the BLM at noon, and the rest of the day was wide open. I didn’t want to go home, didn’t want to have to go back through the command post on the east rim of the gorge, didn’t want to have to go back across the bridge.
To pass the time, I decided to go visit my medicine teacher. I drove five miles north across Grand Mesa. At the Tanoah Falls Casino, I turned off the highway and headed in the direction of the mountains along a winding, narrow road through the tiny village of Cascada Azul, almost deserted now with ski season over. Tanoah Pueblo took a backseat in tourism to the larger Taos Pueblo, with its massive adobe architecture. The little walled village of Tanoah had its own ancient earthen apartment-like structures, but was smaller, off the beaten path, and less well preserved.
Anna Santana, an elder of the tribe, lived in a small adobe home outside the walls of the main part of the village. She had taken me under her wing at an art show just a few months before, at Christmastime. I helped her prevent a calamity when her display of handmade jewelry, dreamcatchers, and pottery almost collapsed. On that first day, moments after we met, she had asked me about my mother. When I told her that my mother had left when I was very young, the Pueblo woman had insisted that I call her “Momma Anna.” And she invited me to share the Christmas feast with her and her family at Tanoah Pueblo, and later, King’s Day and yet another Pueblo feast day. Soon I began coming to her house now and then just to pass time with her as she cooked or made pottery or performed any of the dozens of hardworking endeavors that filled her life. A month or so ago, Momma Anna had announced that she was my medicine teacher, and that she was called to teach me “Indun way.” However, I had no sense that any formal training had begun. At least not yet.
When I pulled up in front of her house, I noticed a plume of blue-gray smoke coming from the back, on the side nearest the acequia, the irrigation ditch that carried water from the rio to the tribe’s fields. A pack of mutts came to greet me, and I stopped to pet heads and scratch ears. I walked around the house and saw a small brown woman bent over, scraping live coals out onto the ground from the floor of the horno-a beehive-shaped outdoor adobe oven used for baking. Momma Anna straightened when she heard my footsteps. She turned, looked me up and down, and then gestured for me to come to her. “You come. We bake pies.”
On the table under the portal behind her house, four trays of folded and crimped, prune-filled pastry pockets huddled under cotton dish towels. These little triangle-shaped pies were a favorite of the Tanoah, and Momma Anna made some of the best I had tasted. Her dough was always crisp and flaky; the filling, which she made from wild plums that grew along the acequia, was chewy, tart, and sticky, never too sweet. I brought the trays over, and we shoved them into the horno, then closed the door almost completely, leaving just enough of an opening so that the heat inside would not burn the pies.
Anna Santana drew up straight after the door was in place and again looked me up and down. “Today we start,” she said. With the shovel she had used to remove the live coals from the horno, she scooped up a burning ember and carried it carefully before her as she made for the back door.
Inside her house, Momma Anna laid the shovel with the glowing coal in its blade on top of the woodstove. She took a pinch of cedar tips from a pottery jar and sprinkled the green buds over the red coal. The cedar began to smudge at once. Momma Anna lifted the shovel handle in one hand, and in the other took up a hand broom fashioned from foot-long stems of ricegrass bound with thread into a short tube shape, the fibers spread on one end for sweeping. She used the broom to fan the smoke over me in a ritual of cleansing and preparation. As she bathed me with the smoke, she mumbled a prayer in Tiwa.
After the prayer, she returned the shovel to the top of the woodstove and left the room without speaking. I stood where I was, inhaling the clean, sharp scent of the purifying smoke. Momma Anna returned with a folded blanket, atop which rested a large elk hide bag. She spread the colorful Pendleton on the floor of her living room in front of the sofa. “Sit down.”
I sat cross-legged on the blanket, and so did she, placing the bag beside her. She reached inside and brought out a small drum made in the Pueblo tradition-from a hollowed-out log covered at both ends with stretched and laced rawhide. This drum was no bigger than six inches in diameter, and not as tall. Next, she brought out the beater-a peeled aspen stick, wrapped on one end with a wad of padding covered with deer hide and tied with sinew. Once more, my medicine teacher reached into the bag, and she drew out a small hand-sewn deerskin pouch, tied with a leather thong. When she had arranged these items between us on the blanket, she looked at me and smiled. She picked up the drum and began beating on it in a steady rhythm. After a minute or two of drumming, she set the instrument down and reached for the pouch. “Hold out hand,” she said.