People of the Moon(25)
Nevertheless those first years had been good. Gourd Pendant’s family had pitched in to construct a pit house for the newlyweds. He would never forget the night they had moved their few belongings into their new home.
How proud he’d been as he’d taken in the freshly plastered bench, the peeled pole stringers, and the juniper support posts. A mealing bin had been built against the southeastern wall, allowing Gourd Pendant to grind flour inside where the wind wouldn’t wick the fine powder away. Uncle Sage had shaped a sandstone slab that could be used to regulate the air flow through the ventilator tunnel so that fire and ash didn’t blow around the room. All in all, it was a tight and comfortable new home.
Together they had lit the ceremonial fire, conducted the Blessing of the sipapu, and admired their good fortune. Over a meal of corn cakes spiced with beeweed, roasted antelope backstrap, and cactus-tuna pudding for dessert, they had giggled, teased, and finally retired to the grass-stuffed bedding at the rear of the house. He would remember her face, half of it golden in the reflected firelight, her eyes gleaming with love. They were staring into each other’s souls at that magical moment when his seed jetted into her fertile loins. Their first child, Blossom, had been born a full nine moons later.
Bulrush liked Gourd Pendant’s family well enough. He had always been a good worker, and went out of his way to labor honestly, to do just a little more than they asked of him. They in turn treated him with respect, if not a little patience given his slow mind. All in all, he counted his blessings, left prayer feather offerings to the gods in gratitude, and considered himself extremely lucky.
Over the years, fortune waxed and waned at Saltbush Farmstead. They heard little of the doings of the Straight Path Nation, and cared less. Sometimes on the rare occasions when they traveled to Lanceleaf Village or Tall Piñon Town to Trade, or to watch the ceremonials, they would see the red-shirted warriors and the immaculately dressed Priests.
Then the drought had settled over them like a spectral vulture. Starvation had been staved off through the collection of wild plant seeds and a fortunate spike in the rabbit cycle. From the roofs of their homes they had seen the Rainbow Serpent as it rose against the southwestern sky like dirty smoke. Gritty gray ash had painted a perpetual dusk overhead and fallen in a thin mantle over the dry soil. Stories had come up the trails about trouble in Straight Path Canyon, of murder and witchcraft.
For five summers the rain had been spotty, the runoff in the wash barely enough to keep the plants alive, let alone allow them to mature for harvest.
This last year had begun even worse. For weeks, Bulrush did nothing but walk, a collecting basket on his back as he gathered yucca, saltbush, stickleaf, goosefoot, cliffrose, ricegrass seeds, wild rye seeds, globemallow, squawbush berries, and cactus tunas. He hung snares for rabbits, burned out packrat nests, and even stole coyote pups from their den. If it walked, flew, or crawled, he killed it for the stew pot.
And day by day, he watched the bellies protrude on his children and saw the listlessness grow in their dull stares. Little Blossom’s ribs looked like basket staves over a swollen melon. Worse, he read the desperation in Gourd Pendant’s once large eyes—now sunken into her skull.
His mother-in-law wasted, slipping her food ration back into the large corrugated cooking pot. One day when her brother, Sage, awoke, she was gone from the house. They found her two days later, sitting atop a low knoll off to the west, her desiccated body savaged by buzzards.
Summer solstice passed, the heat brutal. Gourd Pendant traveled a half-day’s walk each way to fetch home a brownware jug full of water from a spring they shared with the other families in the area.
The night after Uncle Sage buried his youngest daughter, he climbed down into Bulrush’s house. His expression had been grim. Tears had left crooked paths on his dusty face. “We can’t go on like this. I won’t bury another child. Some of us have come up with an idea. We know where there is food, lots of it. But it might be dangerous.”
Bulrush heard him out, all the while looking into his dying son’s eyes where he lay on the worn split-willow matting. His daughter, too, was giving him a haunted stare, her face little more than a skin-covered skull pinched narrow by starvation.
What choice did a man have? Did he sit and watch his family die one by one as the flames in their souls flickered out?
Or did he act?
Ripple sat with his back to the wall. Through the smoke hole, he could see the familiar patterns of the Star People out beyond the soot-darkened ladder that stuck up through the roof. Three corrugated pots had been placed like points in a triangle around the glowing embers in the fire. Burning piñon mixed with the aroma of bubbling stew. His stomach growled so loudly his sister, Fir Brush, glared her irritation.