Wild Indigo Read Free Page B

off. Said it would hurt the tourist trade having things like this happen. Now I ask you: where else could you go and have wild animals crash your hot tub party? You just can’t get that kind of action anywhere else!” He chuckled, savoring his own wry humor. Then he got in his pickup and drove toward the knot of tribal officials, FBI, and tribal police gathered in the broken pen where Jerome Santana had died.

    Later, as the last traces of daylight began to burn crimson and then fuchsia against the black tips of the mountains on the west edge of Grand Mesa, I heard a faint sound from the direction of the pueblo. As I focused in on it, closing my eyes to suppress one sense and heighten another, I heard a chorus of wailing, a call like the voices of dozens of wounded souls. I pulled my field glasses from the floor of my Jeep and trained them on the ancient structure of the pueblo—the southwest edge that was four stories of adobe. Lining the multitiered rooftop, having climbed to the highest point in the village on their aspen-pole ladders, the village priests wrapped in their white blankets were stark against the lapis lazuli sky. They were ululating to the vanishing sun, a miserable song of dying, loss, and sorrow.

    Long after dark, when the roundup of the buffalo had broken off for the night, I drove past the cemetery at the pueblo. Torches burned and family sat in a semicircle on the ground beside the grave of Jerome Santana, who would have been washed and buried before the sun went down on that day. Because they believed his spirit would remain near the corpse, gathering the lessons and love garnered in this lifetime, relatives would stay beside the body, keeping vigil for four days, until his spirit had made the journey to the next world. A woman, wrapped head and body in a white blanket, struggled to her feet as I drove past, her face a dark mystery within the moonlit shroud she wore, her voluminous, tall white moccasins like thick, pale trees growing beneath the dark hem of her skirt. She was facing my direction, and her body turned slightly to follow me as I drove slowly past. Because of my job, I was one of only a few nonresidents allowed to drive within the reservation boundaries during this holy time preceding the Indigo Falls pilgrimage. I could not see the face of the woman, but I knew who it was.
    It was my friend and mentor, my medicine teacher, my pueblo mother, and the mother of the man who died. It was Anna Santana.

2
Momma Anna
    Earlier that day, I had worked with Momma Anna in her kitchen. Bundles of dried wild spinach, ropes of garlic, and ristras of dried chiles hung from the vigas that stretched across the ceiling and supported the earthen roof. She was working over the enormous thigh of an elk, shaving the meat from the slab into thin, transparent strips. She wielded an old bone-handled knife with a wide, tarnished blade. Blood dripped into the sink, and flies buzzed around. Momma Anna shooed them off the flesh, away from her face. As she worked, she threw the meat strips into a bowl of dried chile, ground garlic, salt, and sugar. After she’d cut a bowlful, she tossed them in the spices with her hand, fished them out, and heaped them onto a Styrofoam plate. She handed the dish to me. “Take,” she grunted.
    I stepped out the back door into the garden, where Momma Anna worked tirelessly through the short high-desert growing season to produce a few rows of onions, garlic, chiles, corn, squash, and herbs. I walked across the caked clay soil, dried now from the heat of the summer—the plants sunburned and wilted—to a little pen where Momma Anna had strung lines of string between the fence poles. I carefully arranged the slices of elk meat so that they hung evenly in the hot sun. The flies swarmed to these new, moist strips, as the last batch had already begun to dry and harden. I draped a piece of cloth over each line to discourage the insects.
    I went to the brush arbor