People Of Darkness

Fannie Kinlicheenie thought about how to answer.

“My brother got sick. He had pains in his middle here.” Fannie indicated her stomach. “Where the spirit is. And pains in his legs. We got a hand trembler to come in and find out what was wrong. The hand trembler said a witch had done it to him. He found a little bump on the back of Woody’s head where the witch had put the corpse powder in. Then another one of them got sick, and they got the hand trembler for him. And he’d been witched, too. And the hand trembler said to have an Enemy Way for both of them.” Fannie Kinlicheenie paused, organizing what she wanted to say.

“What’s going on?” Mary asked.

Chee held up his hand. “Just a minute,” he said. And then to the Kinlicheenie woman: “Another one got sick, you said. You mean another member of the church?”

“It was Roscoe Sam,” Fannie said. “One of the bunch that worked at the oil well with Woody. One of them that called themselves the People of Darkness.”

“Ah,” Chee said. He was speaking in English again, conscious of Mary’s curiosity. “And the hand trembler said to have an Enemy Way? To do that right, you have to know who the witch is. Who…”

“That’s right,” Fannie Kinlicheenie said. “They did the Enemy Way for both of them, and it was done right. Both of them got better for a while, but then they had to take Woody off to the hospital at Gallup and he died.”

“They don’t much believe in Navajo Wolves at the hospital,” Chee said. “What did they think he died of?”

“They said it was cancer,” Fannie said. “Leukemia got in his blood.”

“Does Joseph Sam still live around here?”

“He died too,” Fannie Kinlicheenie said. “I heard it was the same thing. Leukemia.”

“I’d say that the Enemy Way didn’t work too well,” Chee said.

“I think they waited too long. But part of it worked. It turned the evil around and pointed it at the Navajo Wolf.” Fannie Kinlicheenie’s smile was full of malice. “He died, too.”

“Do you know who it was?” Chee knew he’d have to wait for an answer and that he might not get one. The Dinee didn’t like to talk of the dead, or of witches. Speaking the name of a dead witch was doubly dangerous.

Fannie Kinlicheenie licked her lips.

“It was the peyote chief,” she said.

And thus she avoided pronouncing the name of Dillon Charley.

24

THEY JOLTED DOWN THE DIRT TRACK toward the graded road that would take them to the asphalt pavement and back to Crownpoint. The sun was down now. High overhead a strip of feathery cirrus clouds glowed salmon pink in the afterglow. But all around them the landscape was dark. Mary had been saying almost nothing.

“Are you going to tell me what all that was about?” She asked it without looking at him.

Chee glanced at her profile. “The part where she started talking Navajo?”

“And you started talking Navajo. Yes. That part.”

“She said some people in the Native American Church were witches, and they gave Woody Begay and Roscoe Sam corpse poisoning, and they both died. And before they died, they held an Enemy Way for them, and that turned the witching around against the witch. And the witch was Dillon Charley, and that’s what killed Dillon.”

Mary was looking at him now. “What do you think of all that?”

“And she said the witches made the oil well blow up,” Chee added. “And that Joseph Sam is dead, too.”

“Did she say why they wanted to do that?”

“No,” Chee said.

“Did she know? Did you ask her?”

“No,” Chee said. “You have to understand about our witches. They wouldn’t need a motive in the normal sense. Do you know about Navajo Wolves?”

“I thought I did,” Mary said. “Aren’t they like the white man’s witches, and witches in general, and our Laguna-Acoma witches?” She laughed. “Hyphenated witches,” she said. “Only with the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs would you get hyphenated witches.”

“The way it works with Navajos, witchcraft is the reversal of the Navajo Way. The way the Holy People taught us, the goal of life was yo’zho’. No word for it in English. Sort of a combination of beauty/harmony, being in tune, going with the flow, feeling peaceful, all wrapped up in a single concept. Witchcraft is the reverse of this concept, basically. There’s a mythology built up around it, of course. You get to be a witch by violating the basic taboos – killing a relative, incest, so forth. And you get certain powers. You can turn yourself into a dog or a wolf. You can fly. And you have power to make people sick. That’s the opposite of the good power the Holy People gave us – to cure people by getting them back into yo’zho’. Back into beauty. So, to make a long story short, a witch wouldn’t have a motive for blowing up an oil well. It’s a bad thing to do, blowing people up. That’s all the motive a skinwalker needs.”

“And she said Dillon Charley was a witch?”

“That’s what she said. The families had an Enemy Way and turned the witching spell around, and Dillon Charley died.”

“That proves he was the witch?”

“Well, sort of,” Chee said. “They’d have to already have him spotted as the witch. Then someone has to get something that belonged to a witch – hair, pair of socks, a hat, something personal. That represents the scalp in the Enemy Way ceremonial. On the last day of the ceremonial, the scalp is shot with an arrow. If everything has been properly done, and they have the right witch, this causes the witch to get sick and die from his own spell.”

“And the patient gets well?”

“That’s the way it works. But it didn’t work for our friend Woody. And it didn’t work for Roscoe Sam.”

The patrol car jolted into a shallow wash and out again. The cloud overhead had changed from pink to a deep glowing red. “Two more dead,” Mary Landon said. “Or three.”

“You predicted Woody,” Chee said.

“There were six of them to begin with,” she said. “Six People of Darkness. Six men who didn’t go to work at the oil well. Now Roscoe Sam is dead, and Joseph Sam and Begay, and Dillon Charley.”

“Leaves Windy Tsossie and Rudolph Becenti,” Chee said. “And so far nobody knows where to find them.”

“That’s too many dead,” Mary Landon said. “They wouldn’t be all that old. Probably late middle age if they were alive now. But they died a long, long time ago. When they were pretty young. Just a few years after the oil well. That’s too many to be dead.” She looked at him thoughtfully. “You think somebody poisoned them all? Something like that? Maybe revenge?”

“As far as we know, Begay died of leukemia,” Chee said. “Same thing with Roscoe Sam. Dillon Charley died in the hospital. Vines says he told him he had some sort of cancer. Anyway, in a hospital they’d have detected poison if it was that.”

“With an autopsy?” Mary asked.

Chee drove a little while. “I think you’re thinking the same thing I’m thinking,” he said. “You’re thinking about Emerson Charley.”

“Yes,” Mary said. “I’m thinking about how Emerson Charley didn’t have an autopsy.”

“Because somebody stole his body out of the cold room at BCMC,” Chee said.

“Which seems a funny thing to steal.”

“Right,” Chee said.

“Unless you don’t want an autopsy performed.”

“Right,” Chee said.

“Which is also what you’d get if you blow the guy into little pieces by bombing his truck. No autopsy. Right?”

“Yeah,” Chee said.

“Yeah,” Mary said. “Yeah, or maybe baloney. Why would anyone want to poison Emerson Charley? Or Dillon Charley? Or Woody Begay, or any of those guys?”