“When my brother-in-law, Arlen, was a boy alone at his house one early fall night on the rez, his family had gone hunting and left him to guard the sheep. He was reheating stew and bread and heard, outside in the darkness, an eerie crying then rattling. He tried to ignore it and eat his supper, but the wailing then rattling grew louder until he could no longer take it. He grabbed his rifle and flashlight and went tramping through the brambles, past the sheep pens, past the alligator juniper, toward the arroyo, where he shone his light. Then he saw it: a bone sticking out of the muddy arroyo, about this long”—Chance let go Eunjoo’s shoes and held out his hands six inches apart—“The bone was seeping with blood, the arroyo gurgling around it. And the wailing was unbearable. He waded into the water, snatched the bone, cursed it, screamed at it, took it to the embankment, and snapped it in half on the ground with the butt of his rifle.” Chance indicated a stomping movement with his own cowboy boots on the cracked asphalt beneath them. “Then he went home and finished his supper. Next morning, his family returned and asked how he’d spent the night. He told them about the bone, how he broke it, destroyed it, and his father said it was a bad thing he’d done and he shouldn’t have touched it. They returned to the arroyo, which had dried up. The water seeped to nothing, the ground a sludge of mud. But worse for Arlen and his family, the broken bone had become a broken animal half-buried in the mire. Now his family would pass away.”

Calliope interrupted him. “Why? That doesn’t make sense.”

“Well, that’s the Zuni way. I don’t know what to tell you, mujer. It’s how the story goes.”

“You could change the story.”

He murmured assent. “I suppose. But that’s not how oral history works. At least not ours. We tell the story as it was told to us. We don’t always know the entire story. For Zuni, there is knowledge only a few privileged leaders of the kivas can know. Though I’m an initiated member of a kiva, there are many things even I don’t know. Entiendes?”

She nodded. It was how she felt about Bisabuela’s stories. Although she didn’t necessarily believe, she had a deep appreciation for the sacred.

Chance continued, “Anyway, three years later, his grandfather’s people had all disappeared.”

“Disappeared?” Eunjoo said. “Like my parents?”

“Well, I don’t know, little bird. That’s just how my brother Arlen tells it, but could be.”

“You’re always scaring her,” Calliope said, reproachfully.