Talking God

that has to be monitored. You won't be able to go home. Not yet.”

“Not ever,” Agnes Tsosie said, still smiling. “But you leave the message for me anyway. And don’t you feel bad about it. Born for Water told Monster Slayer to leave Death alive to get rid of old people like me. You have to make some room for the new babies.“

Agnes Tsosie came home from the hospital at Fort Defiance on the last Monday of August—overriding the objections of her doctor and the hospital establishment by force of the notorious Agnes Tsosie willpower.

In that part of the Navajo Reservation west of the Chuska mountain range and north of the Painted Desert, just about everybody knew about Agnes Tsosie. Old Woman Tsosie had twice served her Lower Greasewood Chapter on the Navajo Tribal Council. National Geographic had used her picture in an article about the Navajo Nation. Her iron will had a lot to do with starting tribal programs to get water wells drilled and water supplies available at every chapter house where hauling drinking water was a problem. Her stubborn wisdom had been important for years among her clansmen, the Bitter Water People. On the Bitter Water Dinee she imposed her rigid rules of peace. Once, she had kept a meeting of two Bitter Water families in session for eleven days until—out of hunger and exhaustion—they settled a grazing rights feud that had rankled for a hundred years.

“Too many people come out of these belagaana hospitals dead,” Agnes Tsosie had told her doctor. “I want to come out alive.” And no one was surprised that she did. She came out walking, helped by her daughter and her husband. She sat in the front seat of her daughter’s pickup, joking as she always did, full of teasing and funny stories about hospital behavior. But on the long drive through the sagebrush flats toward Lower Greasewood the laughter died away. She leaned heavily against the pickup door and her face was gray with sickness.

Her son-in-law was waiting at her hogan. His name was Rollie Yellow and Agnes Tsosie, who liked almost everyone, liked Yellow a lot. They had worked a way around the Navajo taboo that decreed sons-in-law must avoid mothers-in-law. Agnes Tsosie decided that role applied only to mean mothers-in-law with bad sons-in-law. In other words, it applied to people who couldn’t get along. Agnes Tsosie and Yellow had gotten along wonderfully for thirty years and now it was Yellow who half carried her into her summer hogan. There she slept fitfully all afternoon and through the night.

The next morning, Rollie Yellow made the long bumpy drive around the mesa to the Lower Greasewood Chapter House and used the telephone. He called the chapter house at Many Farms and left word that Nancy Yabenny was needed.

Nancy Yabenny was a clerk-typist in the office of the Navajo Timber Industries and a crystal gazer—one of the category of Navajo shamans who specialize in answering hard questions, in finding the lost, in identifying witches, and in diagnosing illnesses so that the proper curing ceremonial can be arranged.

Nancy Yabenny arrived Thursday afternoon, driving a blue Dodge Ram pickup. She was a plump, middle-aged woman wearing a yellow pantsuit which had fit her better when she was slimmer. She carried her crystal, her four- mountains bundle, and the other paraphernalia of her profession in a briefcase. She placed a kitchen chair in the shade beside Agnes Tsosie’s bed. Yellow had moved the bed out of the hogan into the brush arbor so that Agnes Tsosie could watch the thunderclouds form and blow away above the Hopi Buttes. Yabenny and Old Woman Tsosie talked for more than an hour. Then Nancy Yabenny arranged her slab of crystal on the earth, took her jish of sacred things out of her purse, and extracted from it a prescription bottle filled with corn pollen. She dusted the crystal with that, chanted the prescribed blessing song, held it so that the light from the sky illuminated it, and stared into it.

“Ah,” she said, and held the crystal so that Agnes Tsosie could see what she was seeing.

Then she questioned Agnes Tsosie about what they had seen.

It was sundown when Nancy Yabenny emerged from the brush arbor. She talked to Tsosie’s husband and daughter and to Rollie Yellow. She told them Agnes Tsosie needed a Yeibichai to be restored to harmony and beauty.

Rollie Yellow had half expected that, but still it was a blow. White men call it the Night Chant, but the ceremonial was named for its principal participant—Yeibichai, the great Talking God of Navajo metaphysics. As the maternal grandfather of all the other gods, he often serves as their spokesman. It is an expensive ceremony, nine days and nights of feeding the audience of clansmen and friends, and providing for the medicine man, his helpers, and as many as three teams of yei dancers. But much worse than the expense, in the mind of Rollie Yellow, was that what Yabenny had told them meant the belagaana doctor was probably right. Agnes Tsosie was very, very sick. No matter the cost, he would have to find a singer who knew how to do the Night Chant. Not many did. But there was time. The Yeibichai can be performed only after the first frost, after snakes have hibernated, only in the Season When Thunder Sleeps.

Chapter Three

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I heard you decided not to quit,” Jay Kennedy said. “That right?”

“More or less,” Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn said.

“Glad to hear it. How busy are you?”

Leaphorn hesitated, his eyes flicking over the pile of paperwork on his desk, his mind analyzing the tone of Kennedy’s voice on the telephone.

“Nothing unusual,” he said.

“You heard about this body out east of Gallup?”

“I heard a something-or-other,” Leaphorn said—which meant a secondhand report of what had been overheard by the radio dispatcher downstairs. Just enough to know it wasn’t a routine body find.

“It may not be Bureau business,” Kennedy said. “Except technically. But it’s interesting.”

Which was Kennedy’s way of saying he thought it soon would be his business. Kennedy was Gallup area Federal Bureau of Investigation, and had been a friend of Leaphorn's long enough so that such things no longer had to be exactly said.

“The way I heard it, they found him beside the railroad,” Leaphorn said. “That would be off the reservation. None of our business either.”

“No, but it might get to be,” Kennedy said.

Leaphorn waited for an explanation. None came.