how to win the storm clouds back from the Gambler so they would be free again to bring rain and snow to the people” (94). Spider Woman, the “universal feminine principle of creation,” reorients Tayo to his home (94).57 It is Spider Woman, in the form of Ts’eh, who asks him the central question that Silko asks us: “What are you doing here?” (176).58 In other words, are we destroyers or creators?
Creators.
I mean, I create. I plant a vegetable garden, I teach English, I write. Don’t I?
I forget how young I was, but I know I was old enough to know better.
In for the morning milking, the cows drank from their water bowls, the pipes pounding.
“Didn’t you count ’em?” my father said.
“For what?”
“That second-calf heifer. She’s not here,” he said. “Go look on top of the hill; between the gates.”
I’d just come from there with the rest of them; my work shoes were soaked with dew.
“I didn’t see her,” I said.
“She had trouble calvin’ the first time,” he said. “I don’t wanna lose her. Look again.”
He turned away, heading for the milk house.
“What about feedin’ the calves?” I called.
Over his shoulder: “Do that when you get back.”
I hiked back up the hill, looking neither right nor left. She’ll be all right; cows have calves all the time. And they’re better off having them outside, naturally. In the barn, sometimes a new calf slips into the gutter and drowns, or smothers.
I crossed through the first gate and looked around. Nothing. Keeping to the road, I reached the ledges on top of the hill. I could see no black and white against the brown. Annoyed she wasn’t there, I wheeled toward the woods, glancing through the trees. There weren’t too many places she could be; the woodlot was small, the dry pasture pretty open, except for clumps of thorn bushes here and there. On the other side of the trees a lane divided the meadow from the Miller Road; from there I could see the hilltop above the barn. Nothing.
On the way down, I ducked in and out of the woods along the fence, checked the far side of the Ditch, and came back to the barn.
“Didn’t see her,” I said.
“Jesus Christ,” my father said, pulling a milker from a cow. “What’re you back for? She’s hidin’ somewhere.”
“I looked.”
He stood at the door and named places she could be. I said I’d checked every one.
“I don’t know why you didn’t bring her with the rest,” he said. “It doesn’t take long for somethin’ to happen.”
“She’ll be all right.”
He shook his head at me. “You feed these calves and get those milkers hung up. I’ll go goddamn look for her.”
Before I finished feeding the calves, he was back, coming down the walk like he meant it.
“Goddammit all to hell,” he shouted. “She’s right against the wall inside the first gate. How could you miss her?”
“I...”
He slapped his cap across his thigh.
“She needed help!”
“I...”
“Dead. Her and the calf both.”
“But...”
His look jumped at me.
“You gotta start payin’ attention!”
As with each of us, a capacity for destruction lurks within Tayo. When he breaks a beer bottle and attacks his buddy Emo, shoving the shards into Emo’s belly, Tayo “got stronger with every jerk that Emo made, and he felt that he would get well if he killed him” (63). Later, hating whites for “what they did to the earth with their machines,” he assures himself that “he was not one of the destroyers,” even though he “want[s] to kick the soft white bodies into the Atlantic Ocean” (203–4). If killing promotes the magic that seeks to destroy the world, the ultimate sign of Tayo’s healing is when, at the end of the novel, he refuses to succumb to the cycle of violence and decides not to attack Emo, who is torturing and killing their friend Harley (252, 253).
Emo represents the story of the destroyers; he carries a tobacco bag filled with human teeth. During the war, he “fed off each man he killed, and the higher the rank of the dead man, the higher it made Emo,” whose name suggests his self-centeredness: o, me (61). Destroyers like Emo want to “gut human beings,” to empty us of all feeling (229). Attempting to erase creation, they “work to see how much can be lost, how much can be forgotten” (229). To end our common story, to separate people and place, they “choke the life away... the killing soothes them” (232). Tayo has witnessed this evil at its worst, “the dismembered corpses and the atomic heat-flash outlines” (37).
Emo kills Harley at a uranium mine.59 No more appropriate place represents the destroyers: here men mined rock that ushered in our era of mutually assured destruction, a “monstrous design” drawn within Tayo’s homeland, at Los Alamos, a design that threatens all grounds, all homes (246). When subterranean springs flooded the mine in 1943, the U.S. government pumped it dry (243). But by the time it flooded again that summer, the Manhattan Project had had its fill, though “guards remained until August 1945,” when bombs exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki (244). As the horror of wholesale slaughter comes home to him, Tayo recognizes that “from that time on, human beings were one clan again, united by the fate the destroyers planned for all of them, for all living things” (246).
Storytelling connects our stories with those of others, and places all stories within the context of the human story. It teaches us that we’re not alone. This is why only storytelling can save us: stories are “all we have to fight off / illness and death” (2). Clutching a stone “streaked with powdery yellow uranium,” Tayo cries at seeing this pattern, “the way all the stories fit together” (246). Affirming the time immemorial link between story and world, he sees this design written in the stars, which had witnessed “mountains shift and rivers change course and even disappear back into the earth” (254). Reoriented by this long view, he can now embrace Ts’eh, who weaves a creation story, one that makes “the Universe / this world / and the four worlds below”; in her story, “There is life here / for the people. / And in the belly of this story / the rituals and the ceremony / are still growing” (1, 2).60 After turning his back on the uranium mine, Tayo plants for Ts’eh the seeds of a “tall dark green plant with round pointed leaves, deep veined like fossil shells,” a living offering he knows will “grow there like the story, strong and translucent as the stars” (226–27, 254).
By the time he recounts his story to Laguna elders, “Tayo has come home, ordinary in his being, and they can get on with serious business, the day-to-day life of a village, which is what the land, the ceremony, the story, and time immemorial are all about.”61 Tayo’s serious business, a realization of his Uncle Josiah’s dream, is to raise cattle, spotted cattle that “could live in spite of drought and hard weather” (187). Able to adapt to changing conditions, his cows can eat cactus to survive, unlike white-faced Herefords, which “would not look for water” and would die expecting it to come to them (10, 79). Instead of raising “weak, soft Herefords” to conform only to a distant market, Tayo breeds “special cattle” that are, first, one with their place; his animals descend from “generations of desert cattle, born in dry sand and scrubby mesquite, where they hunted water the way the desert antelope did” (74). A mixed breed, his spotted cattle represent “everything that the ideal cow was not”; they could “tell a good place when they found it: springs and good grazing” (75, 225). Hill country, pastureland.
In late July, my mother and I picked my father’s headstone. We chose a square