Read Sacred Clowns for Free Online Page A

come home and say good-bye? It doesn’t make much sense to me.”
    “That’s what I was thinking,” she said. “Where was he? He wouldn’t just go like that. He would stay for the funeral.”
    “You would want to bury Mr. Sayesva right away,” Chee said. “Isn’t that the rule of the Pueblo? You want to do the burial before sundown.”
    “That’s the way it is supposed to be. But they wouldn’t let us do it. There was a deputy sheriff here when it happened, and Mr. Blizzard was here. And the police said they had to take him into Albuquerque to get an autopsy done to find out what killed him.” Mrs. Kanitewa’s expression suggested she considered this hard to understand. “He’d been hit on the head and his head broke, but they said they had to let the doctor see him anyway, to get it all down on paper, and they would try to get him back in time.”
    “They didn’t, though,” Chee said, making it a statement rather that a question. It would have been clearly impossible. Chee had seen a funeral at Zuni Pueblo. The body would have to be washed and dressed, the hair combed out, everything made ready for Sayesva’s four-day journey through the darkness toward his eternal joy. A Tano child of God going home. And he was probably a Roman Catholic as well. The parish priest would also send him on his way with another blessing.
    “It takes too long to get the body back,” she said. “Then his wife and some of his people had to go there and get him. To make sure they didn’t embalm him. They do that if you’re not careful. The undertaker gets a lot of money for it.”
    “We Navajos have that trouble, too,” Chee said. “If you’re not there to stop it, the funeral home people will get the body and mutilate it and charge you a lot of money for doing it. Like they do with white people.”
    “They charge you a lot of money,” Mrs. Kanitewa agreed. “I read in the papers that the funeral home people even got a law passed so you can’t have the corpse incinerated. Even if you say so yourself, you got to get all the kinfolks to sign papers.” She rubbed her fingers together—society’s universal metaphor for the greed of its predator class. “They want to squeeze that money out of the widow.”
    Blizzard shifted his weight on the plastic sofa, creating a round of crackling and signaling his impatience with this philosophizing. “Well,” he said. “You got about all you want?”
    Chee ignored him.
    “I’m not supposed to be asking anything about Mr. Sayesva because they handle that out of Albuquerque,” he told Mrs. Kanitewa. “I’m just interested in talking with Delmar. Do you know why he came home?”
    “Yes,” she said. “He said he had to talk to his uncle.”
    Ahh, Chee thought. He glanced at Blizzard to see if he’d noticed this, if he was aware that Sayesva was the kid’s uncle. Blizzard was. Too late now.
    “To your brother?” Chee asked.
    She nodded. “Yes. To my brother.”
    “He came to tell your brother something?”
    She nodded.
    Blizzard ceased being the stoic Cheyenne sitting motionless on the couch waiting for Chee to finish wasting his time. He cleared his throat and leaned forward.
    “We’re talking about Mr. Sayesva now,” he said. “What did your boy tell him? What did he want to see him about?”
    “It was religious business,” she said. “He didn’t tell me.”
    Sergeant Blizzard looked skeptical. “So how did you know it was religious if he didn’t tell you?”
    The question surprised Mrs. Kanitewa. “Because he didn’t tell me,” she explained. “If it wasn’t religious, he would have told me.”
    Blizzard’s expression changed from skeptical to blank. He said, “I don’t quite . . .” and then stopped. Chee considered interrupting to explain things. To give Blizzard a little lecture on how the Tano people, and most of the other Pueblos, kept their religious duties very much to themselves. Neither the boy nor any other citizen of the pueblo