Pat Carr

“A few years ago when I was researching Pueblo Indian Tales for my work on the mythology of Mimbres pottery, I found myself responding to certain …stories because they seemed to me to deal with the basic human conflicts and experiences such as love,  death,  birth,  jealousy and betrayal—-in short, all of those archetypal themes dealt with in world literature. Many of the plots and characters of these ancient Indian tales seemed well suited for a more contemporary world treatment, and I found myself recreating them as my own stories. The following myth-tales are the result.”
THE EMERGENCE

The people were unhappy
in the dark and
crowded underworld.
Sun took pity on their misery.
OLD PUEBLO MYTH

She knew they had to go, but this time she wanted to stay. Their baby lay flexed beneath the adobe floor of the house, close to her, to them, and it was too hard, too uncaring,  and unloving, to leave this little body alone as they moved on again. She must not go.  The tiny food bowl she had coiled and painted to fit over his little skull had a locust drawn in the center, his favorite insect, one he had caught twice with his baby laughter and pudgy dimpled hand when he had been warm and alive.  The fat little hands that she had crossed over his chest as they put him…
The thought of going away without the baby was unbearable.
“But we must go,” he said behind her and laid his hands on her shoulders as if he knew what was in her mind. They have told us we all must go.” He  put his face into the side of her neck. “We will be together, and we will have
another son when we get to the new home. We will never forget our first born, and that is what is important.”
“He will be left alone between the hardened mud with no family beside him. No other brothers, not his mother or his father. I have the bowls ready, painted for our own burial when we go to join him,” she said stubbornly.
He shook his head. “We must leave the bowls behind. They have said we cannot take anything with us.”
“What of the metates for grinding? The polishing stones?”
“We will get others in the new home.”
“She could tell from his tone that he was finished, that he would argue to convince her no more, and she knew that she would go with him.
She looked up and the world roof was dark and overcast. It would rain again before they left and the mud would slide beneath their feet, sucking at the ankles, holding them back.
She went down the ladder into the single room of the house and knelt beside the wall close to where the baby was buried. She sat quiet, not speaking to the little body beneath the floor, merely being close to him until it was time to go. As she waited, she could hear the first spatters of rain on the outside wall.
Then, before she was ready, he called down to her over the pounding of the rain. “We must leave now.” He watched her, sheltering his forehead against the waters that had soaked his hair, and without speaking, she went up the ladder to join him.
He always seemed to understand, and he took her hand and pressed it.
They went to stand with the others who had collected in the mud that splashed and oozed around them, and they listened through the heavy rain to the instructions of the bow priests and the caciques who would lead.
She held his hand as all of the people formed into a long, silent line that spread down the muddy hill, passed the pueblos of the village, down into the valley itself. She had not thought their village had held so many people.
They waited without talking, the long patient line of the people, even the children quiet, not whimpering or crying, as the rain streamed over them, turning the black clay mud into thick black liquid.
She looked at their house where they had been happy with the baby and where the tiny child lay beneath his sheltering bowl. But as the line moved slowly ahead, the house was lost to her view in the gray shroud of water.
Then It was her turn, and he lifted her slightly out of the mud and held her against his chest until her feet and hands caught at the first rungs.
“Do not look back. I am here behind you.”
The rungs were harsh, crudely and quickly hewn of cane, and even the scores of hands that had touched them before her had not smoothed the many points of cane splinters.
She was not as strong as she had been before the death of the baby and she could feel her arms getting heavy too soon, her breath pulling sharp against her lungs too soon. But the rain had stopped, or at least she, they, were sheltered from it, and the rungs were slippery only with the mud that the others ahead of her had left.
She paused to rest, but he stroked her calf from below and said quietly, “We cannot wait. There are too many others behind us, and we must go on. It is only a little further.”
Of course it was much, much further, and they both knew it, but she started again. She had never wanted to come, but they would be together and they would begin a new life in the new home. That thought had to be enough, had to keep her going. And she climbed, kept climbing for what seemed hours longer, hanging on to the cane, holding it tight with aching palms, aching soles that pressed heavily against the curb of the wood.
She moved her arms and legs by sheer force of will as the hours passed.
Perhaps the caciques and the bow priests had been mistaken and they would find nothing.  Perhaps they had been deliberately misled and the people would merely climb without ceasing, without ever…
“Listen,” he said suddenly behind her. And as she raised one arm and then the other, she could hear it. A sound like no other she had ever heard.  A singing, yet not a singing of the people.  A small clear song without words, joyful, beckoning, brimming with triumphant notes that flowed, trilled, then broke loose from their arch of sound to shower down over them.
“And see,” he said, this voice excited.  “There! Straight above.  It must be the Sun of which the bow priests knew.”
She looked  up as she climbed, and there was a luminous brightness made of a color that chipped into many colors and scattered into writhing, wriggling bits of light about the opening she could see.
“We are almost there!” he said exultant behind her.
The opening came closer, revealed a great vastness beyond as she reached for rung after rung. The brightness swayed dizzily, fragmenting, weaving, untangling its mingled colors as the figures just ahead of her alternately blocked and disclosed it.
At last she was at the opening. A hand reached for hers and pulled her up.
The terrible brightness was blinding, and she cried out with the pain in her eyes, her  temples. She clapped her free hand over her eyes and felt the involuntary pain-water seep through the lids.
“Welcome to the Fourth World,”  a voice said heartily, husky from having said the phrase so many times.
She was drawn free of the ladder and placed on her feet, but she dropped to her knees in the pain, unable to open her eyes.
Suddenly a silence enveloped her, sprang around her, as the sound, the joyous clear clean song abruptly stopped.
“Ah, the song of the Mockingbird has ended,” the voice said.  “No more of the people can come out of the sipapu.”
She forced her eyes open, and through the haze of tears that stood in them she could see his arm aloft at the opening.
“No! No!” She threw herself back toward the hole that was shrinking, closing.
Her hand grasped at his, their fingers and the webs between their fingers clinging, clutching briefly before his hand slid away, down, and the sides of the sipapu clamped tight around her arm.
“No! No!” Her eyes shut themselves again.
“Come, come,” the same hearty, hoarse voice said above her as a hand drew her arm carefully from the miniature opening and patted her shoulder.
“Come, open your eyes and enjoy this new world. Everything is beautiful. See.  Even where your eyes water the ground with the first ache of our Sun a beautiful buttercup springs.  “See,” the voice said happily and the hand patted her again in her darkness.