Ceremony Read Online Free PDF Page A

crush his head with the butt of a rifle, then it would be the rain and the green all around that killed him.
    Tayo talked to the corporal almost incessantly, walking behind him with his end of the blanket stretcher, telling him that it wasn’t much farther now, and all down hill from there. He made a story for all of them, a story to give them strength. The words of the story poured out of his mouth as if they had substance, pebbles and stone extending to hold the corporal up, to keep his knees from buckling, to keep his hands from letting go of the blanket.
    The sound of the rain got louder, pounding on the leaves, splashing into the ruts; it splattered on his head, and the sound echoed inside his skull. It streamed down his face and neck like jungle flies with crawling feet. He wanted to turn loose the blanket to wipe the rain away; he wanted to let go for only a moment. But as long as the corporal was still standing, still moving, they had to keep going. Then from somewhere, within the sound of the rain falling, he could hear it approaching like a summer flash flood, the rumble still faint and distant, floodwater boiling down a narrow canyon. He could smell the foaming flood water, stagnant and ripe with the rotting debris it carried past each village, sucking up their sewage, their waste, the dead animals. He tried to hold it back, but the wind swept down from the green coastal mountains, whipping the rain into gray waves that blinded him. The corporal fell, jerking the ends of the blanket from his hands, and he felt Rocky’s foot brush past his own leg. He slid to his knees, trying to find the ends of the blanket again, and he started repeating “Goddamn, goddamn!”; it flooded out of the last warm core in his chest and echoed inside his head. He damned the rain until the words were a chant, and he sang it while he crawled through the mud to find the corporal and get him up before the Japanese saw them. He wanted the words to make a cloudless blue sky, pale with a summer sun pressing across wide and empty horizons. The words gathered inside him and gave him strength. He pulled on the corporal’s arm; he lifted him to his knees and all the time he could hear his own voice praying against the rain.
     
     
     
    It was summertime and Iktoa’ak’o’ya-Reed Woman was always taking a bath. She spent all day long sitting in the river splashing down the summer rain.
     
    But her sister Corn Woman worked hard all day sweating in the sun getting sore hands in the corn field. Corn Woman got tired of that she got angry she scolded her sister for bathing all day long.
     
    Iktoa’ak’o’ya-Reed Woman went away then she went back to the original place down below.
     
    And there was no more rain then. Everything dried up all the plants the corn the beans they all dried up and started blowing away in the wind.
     
    The people and the animals were thirsty. They were starving.
    So he had prayed the rain away, and for the sixth year it was dry; the grass turned yellow and it did not grow. Wherever he looked, Tayo could see the consequences of his praying; the gray mule grew gaunt, and the goat and kid had to wander farther and farther each day to find weeds or dry shrubs to eat. In the evenings they waited for him, chewing their cuds by the shed door, and the mule stood by the gate with blind marble eyes. He threw them a little dusty hay and sprinkled some cracked corn over it. The nanny crowded the kid away from the corn. The mule whinnied and leaned against the sagging gate; Tayo reached into the coffee can and he held some corn under the quivering lips. When the corn was gone, the mule licked for the salt taste on his hand; the tongue was rough and wet, but it was also warm and precise across his fingers. Tayo looked at the long white hairs growing out of the lips like antennas, and he got the choking in his throat again, and he cried for all of them, and for what he had done.
     
    For a long time he had been white smoke. He