“MY BROTHER?” Fannie Kinlicheenie’s expression was puzzled. “You want to find him?”
They were in the front room of the house. The chair in which Jim Chee sat was covered with a stiff green plastic. He felt the chill of it through his uniform shirt. The house was the “summer hogan” of the Kinlicheenies. There was no heating stove in it. In a while, when the high country frost arrived full force, the family would shift its belongings into the old earth-and-stone “winter hogan” and abandon this poorly insulated structure to the cold. Until then, the problem of the chilly margin between the seasons was solved by weaning more layers of clothing. Fannie Kinlicheenie looked about eight layers deep. Chee wished he had worn his jacket in from the patrol car.
“We heard this man was your brother,” Chee said. “We need some information from him.”
“But he’s dead,” Fannie Kinlicheenie said. “He’s been dead for…” She paused, trying to put a date on it. “Why, he was dead when I got married, and that was 1953.”
Chee glanced at Mary. “I didn’t know that,” he said.
Fannie Kinlicheenie was frowning at him.
“Why did you want to talk to him?”
“He used to be a member of the peyote church. The one over by Grants. We wanted to ask him about that.”
“Those sons-a-bitches,” Fannie Kinlicheenie said in English. “What you want to know about them?”
“About something that happened way back. Your brother and some of them were working on an oil well. The peyote chief warned them not to go one day, and the well blew up while they were away.”
“I know about that,” Fannie said. “I was a girl then and I was in that peyote church, too. I was the water carrier. You know about that?”
“Yes,” Chee said. He didn’t know everything about the Native American Church, but he knew the water carrier, usually a woman, played a minor note in the ritual.
“Those sons-a-bitches,” she repeated. “There was…” She paused, glanced at Mary, and back at Chee. They had been speaking in English, the language shared by all three. Now Fannie Kinlicheenie shifted languages. “There was witches in that church,” she said in Navajo. One talked cautiously of witches. One discussed them with strangers reluctantly. One talked of them not at all in front of those who were not members of the People. Mary was not Dinetah – not of the People.
“How do you know they were witches?” Chee asked. He stuck to English. “Sometimes people get blamed for being skinwalkers when they’re not.”
Fannie Kinlicheenie answered in Navajo. “They gave my brother corpse sickness,” she said.
“Maybe he ran into a witch somewhere else.”
“It was them,” she said. “There were other things. There was that oil well that blew up that year. They pretended the Lord Peyote told them it was going to happen. They told everybody that the Lord sent a vision to tell them not to go to work that day. But the witches blew up that oil well. That’s how they knew it was going to happen.”
“How do you know that?” Chee asked. He had forgotten to speak English. In fact, he had forgotten Mary, who sat there listening and looking puzzled.
“I just know it,” Fannie Kinlicheenie said.
Chee considered this. An irrelevant thought intruded. In a white man’s home there would not be this complete silence. There would be the ticking of a clock, the sounds refrigerators make, the noise of a TV coming from somewhere. Here there was no sound at all. No traffic noise. No sirens. Outside it was sunset now; even the breeze was still.
“My aunt,” Chee said, using a young man’s title of respect for an older woman, “I have come a long way to talk with you here because what you know may be very important. I think that something very bad happened at that oil well and that people may still die because of it. If Navajo Wolves did it, then I think we are still dealing with the same bunch of witches. Can you tell me how you knew Navajo Wolves blew up that oil well? Did somebody tell you?”
“Nobody told me. Just my own head.”
“How was that?”
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.