Chapters (41)
- PART ONE
- ONE
- TWO
- THREE
- FOUR
- FIVE
- SIX
- SEVEN
- EIGHT
- NINE
- TEN
- ELEVEN
- TWELVE
- THIRTEEN
- FOURTEEN
- FIFTEEN
- PART TWO
- SIXTEEN
- SEVENTEEN
- EIGHTEEN
- NINETEEN
- TWENTY
- TWENTY-ONE
- TWENTY-TWO
- TWENTY-THREE
- TWENTY-FOUR
- TWENTY-FIVE
- TWENTY-SIX
- TWENTY-SEVEN
- TWENTY-EIGHT
- TWENTY-NINE
- PART THREE
- THIRTY
- THIRTY-ONE
- THIRTY-TWO
- THIRTY-THREE
- THIRTY-FOUR
- THIRTY-FIVE
- THIRTY-SIX
- THIRTY-SEVEN
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
“Mujer, I’m not an expert on Zuni cosmology by any stretch. But I’ll tell you what I think. We’ve been shifting a long time. We came into this fourth world, and the white man calls it evolution, but we Zuni know that there’s a metaphysical side to the story. Mother Earth, when she is fed up, will shake herself off. There are stories that Old Lady Salt did the same, and Moon Mother changed the tides after Neil Armstrong and the other astronauts tramped on her, and stuck American flags into her skin, and raided nearly fifty pounds of rock and dust from her body without so much as a cornmeal offering or prayer. I’m a physicist, yes. I believe in science. But what they did here in our Middle Place in 1945, that wasn’t science. What the white man has been doing since …” He was silent a long while. “The genocide started again when the protests were growing and the energy was crackling like static electricity. Not just up north but in Zuni and everywhere, The People were trying to protect our land and our water. I watched an elder fall at my feet, his staff clattering to the pavement of the shut-down highway. Police barraged us with smoking tear-gas canisters from grenade launchers. They put us in cages, like animals. If we’d known what was coming next … We prayed and burnt sage and sweetgrass, we held dances, supporting our brothers and sisters in the North. When they threatened round-ups and destroyed Mother Earth, we knew it couldn’t last long …”
“I felt something coming too,” Calliope said. “Andres and I were planning for it. That’s why I thought he’d be at my tía’s.”
They drove in silence until long after the sun rose, Eunjoo sleeping against Calliope, Mara against Chance.
Finally, Calliope said, “Chance, did you ever believe we would find my family?”
“I should’ve taken you to my people first. I still think we can find them. But we shouldn’t have gone to Silver City. I realize that now.”
Calliope squeezed her eyes shut as a fresh contraction wrung her into a dishrag, sodden with pain vibrating from her belly down her thighs.
“I’ll get you there, fast as I can, momma. Don’t have those babies in this truck.”
“I’ll try my best,” Calliope said, between short, panting breaths, no longer deluding herself that they weren’t due for two months. The babies were coming, she felt it. She only hoped they’d wait a little longer.
* * * *