Listening Woman’s expression was grim. Why you want to waste your money, Old Man?
she asked. You get me to come all the way out here to find out what kind of a cure you need. Now you wont tell me what I need to know.
Tso sat motionless, looking straight ahead.
Listening Woman waited, frowning. God damn it! she said. Some things I got to know.
You think you been around some witches. Just being around them skin-walkers can make you sick. I got to know more about it.
Tso said nothing.
How many witches?
It was dark, Tso said. Maybe two.
Did they do anything to you? Blow anything at you? Throw corpse powder on you?
Anything like that?
No, Tso said.
Why not? Mrs. Cigarette asked. Are you a Navajo Wolf yourself? You one of them witches?
Tso laughed. It was a nervous sound. He glanced at Anna Atcitty a look which asked help.
I’m no skinwalker, he said.
It was dark, said Listening Woman, almost mockingly. But you said it was daytime. Were you in the witches den?
Tsos embarrassment turned to anger. Woman, he said, I told you I couldn’t talk about where it was. I made a promise. We will talk about that no more.
Big secret, Mrs. Cigarette said. Her tone was sarcastic.
Yes, Tso said. A secret.
She made an impatient gesture. Well, hell, she said. You want to waste your money, no use me wasting my time. If I don’t hear anything, or if I get it wrong, its because you wouldn’t tell me enough to know anything. Now Anna will take me to where I can hear the voice-in-the-earth. Don’t mess with the painting on your chest. When I get back I will try to tell you what sing you need.
Wait, Tso said. He hesitated. One more thing. Do you know how to send a letter to somebody who went on the Jesus Road?
Listening Woman frowned. You mean moved off the Big Reservation? Ask Old Man McGinnis. Hell send it for you.
I asked. McGinnis didn’t know how, Tso said. He said you had to write down on it the place it goes to.
Listening Woman laughed. Sure, she said. The address. Like Gallup, or Flagstaff, or wherever they live, and the name of the street they live on. Things like that. Who do you want to write to?
My grandson, Tso said. I have to get him to come. But all I know is he went with the Jesus People.
I don’t know how you’re going to find him, Listening Woman said. She found her cane.
Don’t worry about it. Somebody else can take care of getting a singer for you and all that.
But there’s something I have to tell him, Hosteen Tso said. I have to tell him something before I die. I have to.
I don’t know, Listening Woman said. She turned away from Tso and tapped the brush arbor pole with her cane, getting her direction. Come on, Anna. Take me up to that place where I can listen.
Listening Woman felt the coolness of the cliff before its shadow touched her face. She had Anna lead her to a place where erosion had formed a sand-floored cul-de-sac. Then she sent the girl away to await her call. Anna was a good student in some ways, and a bad one in others. But when she got over being crazy about boys, she would be an effective Listener. This niece of Listening Woman’s had the rare gift of hearing the voices in the wind and getting the visions that came out of the earth. It was something that ran in the family a gift of divining the cause of illness. Her mothers uncle had been a Hand-Trembler famous throughout the Short Mountain territory for diagnosing lightning sickness.
Listening Woman herself she knew was widely known up and down this corner of the Big Reservation. And someday Anna would be famous, too.
Listening Woman settled herself on the sand, arranged her skirts around her and leaned her forehead against the stone. It was cool, and rough. At first she found herself thinking about what Old Man Tso had told her, trying to diagnose his illness from that. There was something about Tso that troubled her and made her very sad. Then she cleared her mind of all this and thought only of the early-evening sky and the light of a single star. She made the star grow larger in her mind, remembering how it had looked before her blindness came.
An eddy of wind whistled through the pinons at the mouth of this pocket-in-the-cliff. It stirred the skirt of Listening Woman, uncovering a blue tennis shoe. But now her breathing was deep and regular. The shadow of the cliff moved inch by inch across the sandy space. Listening Woman moaned, moaned again, muttered some-thing unintelligible and lapsed into silence.
From somewhere out of sight down the slope, a half-dozen ravens squawked into startled flight. The wind rose again, and fell. A lizard emerged from a crevice in the cliff, turned its cold, unblinking eyes on the woman, and then scurried to its late-afternoon hunting stand under a pile of tumbleweeds. A sound partly obscured by wind and distance reached the sandy place. A woman screaming. It rose and fell, sobbing. Then it stopped. The lizard caught a horsefly. Listening Woman breathed on.
The shadow of the cliff had moved fifty yards down the slope when Listening Woman pushed herself stiffly from the sand and got to her feet. She stood a moment with her head down and both hands pressed to her face still half immersed in the strangeness of the trance. It was as if she had gone into the rock, and through it into the Black World at the very beginning when there were only Holy People and the things that would become the Navajos were
