anyone what I'd seen, ever. Not even my wife. I never wanted to say it out loud. You are the very first person, Joseph.'
That was true, too, Joseph knew, and he felt oddly honored to know his uncle had made such an effort for him. From Uncle Joe's discomfort, he knew this was not just another argument for the old man's late-gained traditionalist worldview. It was an act of deep humility and courage. And, touchingly, affection.
'Why did you tell me, Uncle?'
'Yeah, I'm trying to figure that out. Now I'm so shook up I lost what I was going to say.' Uncle Joe looked down at his cigarette, which had burned to the knuckles of his shaking hand and had to be searing him. He flicked it down, ground it out, and stared at his own footprint for a moment.
'After that, I changed. The family put on a Sing for me, and that helped. Mainly, what changed me was I had to think about what it meant to be a man like him, how he got that way. Once, he was probably like anyone else. Then he changed, maybe bit by bit, or maybe all at once, who knows, maybe what's happening to Tommy Keeday happened to him and that's what he became. I don't know. Before that, I was a little fast and loose-in the army, in school. I could talk people into anything, I didn't mind taking their money in ways that weren't so good. And women-that kind of thing. But for years after that, every time I was alone, I saw that… thing… sitting up off the rocks. It came together in my mind with some bad stuff I'd seen in Korea, too, made me realize that whatever was wrong with that Wolf came from something that's inside every man. Even me. And I decided I didn't want to become anything like that. I couldn't change what I'd seen, but what I would be-that much I could control, I could decide.'
Uncle Joe had begun drifting back toward the truck, Joseph tagging just behind. 'So I guess I thought you should probably think about that. Before we talk to the Keedays. When you're dealing with this boy's problem and the business with Julieta. Today we're coming clean about Julieta's baby, I'll help you however I can. But a thing like this, what you're going to be dealing with, it's going to be very hard. But what you do with it-that you should think about. How you let it change you. How you might choose.'
Back in the cab, Uncle Joe didn't start up the truck right away. He sat, slumped with weariness, gazing at the dead-iguana ledge, as if lost in memory. It occurred to Joseph that he hadn't seen his uncle take a drink today, and that he couldn't recall any other time he'd seen him without a bottle close by. He had to be feeling the hard hand of his addiction on him by now. It reinforced his sense that the old man was doing something very heroic for him today.
At last Uncle Joe turned the key and the truck's big engine made a startling roar in the silence.
'Tell you one thing, though,' Uncle Joe said finally. He shook his head, as if astonished and grateful for at least one certainty in life. 'That Willys was one good little jeep. That was the only time it ever died on me. Only time it ever let me down, and I worked that bastard like a mule.'
38
The Keeday homesite was about four miles off the road they'd come in on, a driveway consisting of parallel wheel tracks meandering between rotting buttes and over rolling swells of bare hardpan. Uncle Joe skillfully navigated the truck over the rough ground, sometimes at no more than a walking pace. As with most rural Navajos, the various units of the Keedays' extended family had lived for generations within shouting distance of each other, so the place was about what Joseph expected: a scattering of hogans, shacks, sheds, sheep pens spread over a half mile or so. But the deaths of Tommy's parents and relocations of other kin had left the grandparents and Tommy alone on the old place, and all but the grandparents' current residence were unused and falling apart.
The old Keedays' home consisted of a small, aluminum-clad trailer fronted by a tin-roofed, open lean-to. Close by stood a log hogan in good repair. Between buildings, a little chipboard shed housed a gasoline-powered electrical generator that radiated wires to the trailer, hogan, and main sheep shed. Other pole sheds served as summer kitchen, work spaces, barns. A four-wheeled ATV and a battered white Ford pickup were parked next to a pair of rust-stained 250-gallon fuel tanks. The extensive board- and wire-fenced sheep pens were empty now but for two gaunt horses and maybe a dozen sheep. With the grandparents getting too old to manage a lot of animals, the family would have moved the main flock to some other relative's place.
They arrived and sat in the truck with the windows rolled down, listening to the silence that lay on the land like a heavy physical thing, wrapping and muffling the whole uneven circle of the horizon. At last the trailer door opened to reveal Tommy's grandmother, a tiny, wizened woman wearing a wide dark-brown dress and red wool sweater. They got out of the truck and made greetings, and after another couple of minutes the old man came out. From what Joseph could see of his face beneath his cowboy hat and black horn-rims, his deeply seamed features seemed carved of aged, smoke-darkened wood. His new-looking blue jeans and crisp checked shirt cinched with a bolo tie suggested he'd dressed up when he'd heard visitors arrive.
When Joseph had first met them at the hospital, their stiff walks, weathered faces, cautious eyes, knobbed hard-worked hands, and the faint sweet stink of lanolin and sheep manure had made them seem rustic and anachronistic, especially set against the sterile tiles of the hospital corridors. In this landscape, though, they seemed stronger, aged but hardy, at home among the brown rocks and dry earth.
But they were also very frightened. However Tommy's condition had developed in the last two days, Joseph knew, what they had seen had been harrowing.
The grandfather was older than Uncle Joe, and Uncle Joe treated him with deference as they made courtesies, mentioned family members who knew family members, remembered veterinary visits from years past, talked about the health of the flock and the price of wool. Watching them, Joseph wondered if even they knew their grandson was adopted. He tried to picture Hastiin Keeday as a member of a lynch mob that had murdered an old recluse forty years ago. To his surprise, he found he couldn't muster any judgment against him. Whatever this grave, frail man had done, he'd acted with conscience.
Another sign of eroding certainties, Joseph thought with alarm. Values, beliefs, all up for grabs.
The grandparents explained that they'd been wary when they'd heard the truck coming because a Child Protective Services agent had already been there looking for Tommy. When they'd told him that the boy wasn't there, the agent had waved legal papers and warned them that he planned to stop by the houses of Tommy's various aunts and uncles, too.
They were scared of trouble with the authorities, they said, but after what they had seen last night, they were vastly more afraid of the ghost that moved in Tommy and what it meant for their family. Even their hardbitten dignity couldn't hide that hunted, fearful look.
'What happened?' Joseph asked.
They darted glances at each other, reluctant to speak of it. But Hastiin Keeday made a grim face and ground it out: 'Our son and our daughter went to the hospital and brought him back here. The Hand-Trembler, Edison Begaye, we had already asked him to be here. We held the divination last night. Tommy seemed better on the way home, and we hoped maybe he was going to be all right. But later, we saw the ghost awaken in him.' The old man shut his eyes momentarily as if trying to banish the image. He gestured at a deeply bowed pinon branch among a bundle of kindling: 'He bent his back like that, and he spoke in a stranger's voice. For a long time he bent back and forth on the ground, like a grub from the soil. He tore his shirt off and we could see the chindi moving in the muscles in his back. He bit himself. We couldn't stop him. Not even Hastiin Begaye, not our son Raymond. We couldn't move our legs or arms to help him.'
'What did Hastiin Begaye say?' Uncle Joe asked.
The old woman answered: 'The chindi of an ancestor has come into him. It's very angry because it was wronged when it was alive.' The grandmother bit off the words and then sealed her mouth tight in its radiating wrinkles, growing stern, cutting off any further discussion of the details because the chindi might hear and figure out ways to sabotage the healing rituals. Joseph knew that the old people would need Ways sung, too, having been contaminated by their proximity to Tommy.
With Uncle Joe's tactful probing, they told him that the younger family members had brought the boy up to the summer sheep camp, where they were caring for him in shifts. A young grandson named Eric served as runner between sites, taking up supplies on his ATV. They had already arranged the curing Way with a renowned Singer from Red Rock, and preparations were under way for the ceremony early next week.
