The Ghostway

It also seemed natural to Chee that Frank Sam Nakai was absolutely delighted to see him. Nakai had been shoveling snow into barrels, where the sun would convert it into drinking water, when he saw Chee approaching. His shout of welcome brought Chee's aunt out of the house. His aunt by white man's reckoning was Mrs. Frank Sam Nakai. Her Navajo friends, neighbors, and clansmen called her Blue Woman in honor of her spectacular turquoise jewelry. But to Chee she was and always had been and would be Little Mother, and in honor of his visit she opened cans of peaches and candied yams to augment the spicy mutton tacos she served him for his supper. Only when all that was finished, and the utensils cleared from the table, and news of all the family covered, did Chee bring up what had brought him here.

'My father,' he said to Frank Sam Nakai, 'how many yataalii are left who know how to cure someone of the ghost sickness?'

Behind him, where she was sitting beside the stove, Chee heard Little Mother draw in her breath. His uncle digested the question.

'There are two ways it can be done,' he said finally. 'There is the nine-day sing and the five-day. I think not many know the nine-day any more. Maybe only an old man who lives up by Navajo Mountain. Up in Utah. You could find somebody to do the five-day cure a little easier. There was a man who knew it, I remember, when we were teaching young people to be yataalii at the Navajo Community College. I remember he said he learned it from his uncle, and his uncle lived over on the Moenkopi Plateau, over there by Dinnebito Wash. So that would be two. But the uncle was old even then. Maybe he is dead by now.'

'How could I find this man? The younger one?'

'Tomorrow we will go to Ganado. To the college. They kept a list there of everybody who knew the sings, and where they lived.' His uncle's face was asking the question that his courtesy would never allow him to put in words. Who suffered from ghost sickness? Was the victim Jim Chee?

'I'm trying to find a girl of the Turkey Clan who people call Margaret Billy Sosi,' Chee said. 'She was in a chindi hogan, and I think she will be having a sing.' He heard a sigh from Little Mother, a sound of relief. He didn't want to tell these two that he, too, was infected. He didn't want to tell his uncle what he had done. He didn't want to tell him that he was going to get a job with the fbi, and leave the People, and give up his idea of being a yataalii like his uncle. He didn't want to see the sadness in that good man's face.

They'd had coffee and bread and had three horses saddled before it was time for his uncle to take a pinch of pollen and a pinch of meal and go out to bless the rising sun with the prayer to Dawn Boy. Little Mother rode with them to lead their horses back, and everything went very rapidly. The drive back over the now-frigid snow was like driving over ground glass, squeaking and crunching under Chee's tires. They were on the good road past Blue Gap in thirty minutes. Before noon, they were in the library at Navajo Community College, working their way through the roster of men and women who are shamans of the Navajos.

Chee hadn't known it existed. He should have known, he thought. It would be useful to any policeman. And even while he was thinking that, another part of his consciousness was shocked and dismayed. So few names. And so many of them listed as knowing only the Blessing Way, or the Enemy Way, or the Yeibichi, the Night Chant, or the more common and popular curing rituals. He glanced at Frank Sam Nakai, who was running his finger slowly down the page. His uncle had told him that the Holy People had taught the Dinee at least sixty such rituals, and that many of them were lost in those grim years when the People had been herded into captivity at Fort Sumner. And he could see by this that more were being lost. He looked down the list to see how many singers knew the Stalking Way, which he had been trying to learn. He saw only the name of his uncle and one other man.

'Just two know the Ghostway,' his uncle said. 'That fellow I told you about and his old uncle, way over there west of Hopi country. Just two.'

'It would probably be the younger man,' Chee said. 'The Turkey Clan seems to be eastern Navajos—mostly on this side of the Chuskas.'

'You can see why we need you,' Frank Sam Nakai said. 'Everybody is forgetting everything. There won't be anybody left to cure anybody. Nobody to keep us being Navajos.'

'Yeah,' Chee said. 'That's the way it looks.' He'd have to tell Frank Sam Nakai soon. Very soon. But today he just couldn't do it.

The fellow who knew the Ghostway (and the Blessing Way and Mountaintop Way) was on the book as Leo Littleben, Junior. And he lived not way the hell a thousand miles down a dirt track on the other side of the reservation but at Two Story, just twenty-five miles down the highway toward Window Rock. And—rarity of rarities on the reservation—he was listed in the Navajo-Hopi telephone book.

'I think my luck's changing,' Chee said.

Somebody answered the telephone at the Littleben residence. A woman.

'He's not here,' she said.

'When do you expect him back?' Chee asked.

'I don't know. Three-four more days, I think.'

'Anyplace I can reach him?'

'He's doing a sing.'

'Do you know where?'

'Way over there on the Canoncito Reservation.'

His luck hadn't changed much, Chee thought. Canoncito was as far as you could get from Ganado and still be in Navajo country. It was a fragment of reservation separated from the Big Reservation by miles of private land and by the Acoma and Laguna Indian reservations. It was practically in Albuquerque. In fact, it was outside Dine' Bike'yah, on the wrong side of the Turquoise Mountain. Some strictly orthodox medicine men would refuse to hold a sing there.

'Do you know who it's for?' Chee said. 'Who hired him?'

'For some woman named Sosi, I think it is.'

'A Ghostway?'

'A Ghostway,' the woman agreed. 'He's doing the five-day sing. Be back in another three-four days.'