The Night the White Deer Died Read Online Free PDF

tone that was so natural and fine that it nearly took Janet’s breath away to see it. It was a series of small apartments, stacked three high, arranged in a U-shape with a wall across the open end of the U, all of adobe bricks and hand-plastered with adobe mud so that it almost looked sculpted, with no straight lines but gentle curves on every corner and around every door and window. In the courtyard formed by the closed-in U there were several large domed objects made of adobe with small openings in the side. These, she knew, were earthen ovens for baking bread—once she’d eaten some of the bread with her mother at a sale the Indian women had in town—but they looked more like giant beehives made of rich earth.
    “It’s a good place.” Billy’s voice was straight andlevel, smooth and low, and she turned and saw that he was smiling as he looked at the pueblo. “It’s a good place.”
    She nodded. “It’s beautiful—old and beautiful.” She had read once that pueblos were the oldest continually lived-in structures in North America; some of them had been inhabited for thirteen hundred consecutive years—Indians living all those years in the same buildings, adding apartments as needed wherever the population expanded past the normal number of a thousand or so.
    “It’s a fine place to live,” she agreed. “A great place …”
    He shrugged suddenly, and she could sense the mood change in him, as though he’d been caught doing something private and didn’t want her to see it.
    “You got a dollar?” He looked at her. “I’m hurtin’ for some wine.”
    This time she shook her head. “No. No dollar. Not even at home.”
    “So. Maybe so you go home to your home, and I’ll go into Indi’n home if you don’t got a dollar.” His voice had reverted to the chopped sound. “Maybe so you better leave now.”
    And he turned and went into the pueblo and left her standing, not really believing that he’d done it to her, not wanting to believe it, until it was obvious that he wasn’t coming back out of the beautiful earthen structure and that he’d really just left her standingalone two miles out of Tres Pinos on a dirt road and wasn’t going to invite her into the pueblo.
    Then she swore once, viciously, using a word she’d heard Julio use one night when he’d screamed at the police as they drove by, and then she began the long walk back to her house and a cool bath to slow her anger.

6
    It was the next morning, early, and Janet was just coming out of sleep with that warm, loose feeling. She hadn’t had the dream and was lazily wondering how to spend the day, because it was only one more week until school started and she didn’t want to waste the week.
    There was sun outside, and warm morning smells in the house, and she was wrapping her mind around the idea of breakfast when her mother knocked gently and came into her room.
    She was wearing her old tie-around housecoat and had one hand behind her back. She sat on the foot of the bed and looked at Janet.
    “Is there some part of your life you’d like to tell me about, Janet?” Her voice was light, but her eyes were serious. “Something you think I might want to know?”
    Janet sat up, stretched, yawned. “No. I can’t think of anything. Why?”
    “Well, no real reason. I mean I don’t want you tothink I’m prying. But when I went out for the goat milk”—they had fresh goat milk delivered every morning—“I found this next to our gate.” She brought her hand from behind her back and placed an object on the bed next to Janet.
    Out of the corner of her eye Janet caught the movement of hair and grayness, and she yelped and jumped. “What’s that?”
    Her mother laughed. “Don’t worry, it’s not alive. It’s a kachina.…” She picked it off the bed where it had dropped and handed it to her daughter.
    “A kachina?” Janet took the object and found it to be a doll, made of wood and clay with what looked like real black hair but was