Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko

protected them from the gossip in the village. But she never let them forget what she had endured, all because of what they had done. That’s why Tayo knew she wouldn’t send him away to a veterans’ hospital.
    He lay with his face in the pillow. She had always watched him more closely than Rocky, because Rocky had been her own son and it had been her duty to raise him. Those who measured life by counting the crosses would not count her sacrifices for Rocky the way they counted her sacrifices for her dead sister’s half-breed child. When Rocky died he became unassailable forever in his frame on top of her bureau; his death gave her new advantages with the people: she had given so much. But advantages wear out; she needed a new struggle, another opportunity to show those who might gossip that she had still another unfortunate burden which proved that, above all else, she was a Christian woman. That was how it would be; he figured it out the first afternoon he was home.
    At the end of the first week, she came into the room and pulled the sheets and blankets from all the beds, and he realized then she changed the beds as if Josiah and Rocky still slept there, tucking the dark wool blankets around the corners of the clean sheets, stuffing the pillows into starched white pillowcases she had ironed the day before. Finally he heard her step close to his bed and lift the lid on the slop jar to see if it needed to be emptied.
    “How are you feeling?”
    He knew she wanted him to get out of the bed while she changed the sheets. He sat up and swung his legs around to the floor. He got up unsteadily and moved toward the chair at the foot of the bed, but she took his arm and guided him to Rocky’s bed. He wanted to pull out of her reach and go to the chair, but he was swaying with nausea. She pushed him into the bed and brought the slop jar. He pulled his knees up to his belly and writhed in the bed, fighting back the gagging. He felt the old mattress then, where all the years of Rocky’s life had made contours and niches that Tayo’s bones did not fit: like plump satin-covered upholstery inside a coffin, molding itself around a corpse to hold it forever. He called for help, and he drew his legs and arms stiffly to his sides and arched his back away from the mattress. His heart was pounding louder than his calls for help; he could hear old Grandma answering him, but Auntie did not come. Finally she came in from the porch. The sleeves of her dress were rolled up, her hands were damp and smelled like bleach. She pulled him from the bed, her face tight with anger.
    He pointed at the windows. “The light makes me vomit.”
    She pulled down the shades, and he knew she was staring at him, almost as if she could see the outline of his lie in the dim light. But his advantage was the Army doctors who told her and Robert that the cause of battle fatigue was a mystery, even to them. He felt better in the dark because he could not see the beds, where the blankets followed smooth concave outlines; he could not see the photographs in the frames on the bureau. In the dark he could cry for all the dreams that Rocky had as he stared out of his graduation picture; he could cry for Josiah and the spotted cattle, all scattered now, all lost, sucked away in the dissolution that had taken everything from him. Old Grandma sat by her stove, comfortable with darkness too. He knew she listened to him cry; he knew she listened to the clang of the enamel lid of the slop jar as he removed it and leaned over to vomit.
    In the beginning old Grandma and Robert stayed away from him, except to say “Good morning” or “Good night”; the sickness and his crying overwhelmed them. Auntie had taken charge of him. In low clear tones that Tayo could hear, she warned them to be careful to make no mention of Rocky or Josiah. Tayo could see what she was trying to do.
    When he heard Robert come in from a trip to the ranch, he sat up on the bed and called him.
    “The