Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 03] by Listening Woman [txt] Page A

Teec Nos Pos and start asking around among them Salt Cedar people. I never even heard Ford had any children until old Hosteen Tso come in here a while before he got killed and told me he wanted to write this letter to his grandson.” Mcginnis’s face creased with remembered amusement. “I told him I didn’t know he had a grandson, and he said that made two things I didn’t know about him and of course I asked him what the other one was and he said it was which hand he used to wipe himself.
    ” Mcginnis chuckled and sipped his bourbon. “Witty old fart,” he said. “What did he say in the letter?”
    “I didn’t write it,” Mcginnis said. “But let’s see what I can remember about it. He come in one day. It was colder’n a wedge. Msta been early in March. He asked me what I charged to write a letter and I told him it was free for regular customers. And he started telling me what he wanted to tell this grandson and would I send the letter to him and of course I asked him where this boy lived and he said it was way off east somewhere with nothing but white people. And I told him he’d have to know more than that for me to know what to write on the front of the envelope.”
    “Yeah,” Leaphorn said. When a marriage broke up in the matriarchal Navajo system, it wouldn’t be unusual for paternal grandparents to lose track of children. They would be members of their mother’s family. “Ever hear anything about Ford’s wife?”
    Mcginnis rubbed his bushy white eyebrow with a thumb, stimulating his memory. “I think I heard she was a drunk, too. Another no-good.
    Works that way a lot. Birds of a feather.” Mcginnis interrupted himself suddenly by slapping the arm of the rocker. “By God,” he said. “I just thought of something. Way back, must have been almost twenty years ago, there was a kid staying with Hosteen Tso. Stayed there a year or so. Helped with the sheep and all. I bet that was the grandbaby.”
    “Maybe,” Leaphorn said. “If his mother really was a drunk.”
    “Hard to keep track of Navajo kids,” Mcginnis said. “But I remember hearing that one went off to boarding school at St. Anthony’s. Maybe that’d explain what Hosteen Tso said about him going on the Jesus Road. Maybe them Franciscan priests there turned him Catholic.”
    “There’s something else I want to know about,” Leaphorn said. “Tso went to a sing not very long before he was killed. You know about that?” Mcginnis frowned. “There wasn’t no sing. About last March or so? We had all that sorry weather then.
    Remember? Blowing snow. Wasn’t no sings anywhere on the plateau.”
    “How about a little earlier?” Leaphorn asked. “January or February?”
    Mcginnis frowned again. “There was one a little after Christmas.
    Girl got sick at Yazzie Springs. Nakai girl. Would have been early in January.”
    “What was it?”
    “They did the Wind Way,” Mcginnis said.
    “Had to get a singer from all the way over at Many Farms. Expensive as hell.”
    “Any others?” Leaphorn asked. The Wind Way was the wrong ritual. The sand painting made for it would include the Corn Beetle, but none of the other Holy People mentioned by Hosteen Tso. “Bad spring for sings,” Mcginnis said. “Everybody’s either getting healthy, or they’re too damn poor to pay for ‘.” Leaphorn grunted.
    There was something he needed to connect. They sat. Mcginnis moved the glass in small, slow circles which spun the bourbon to within a centimeter of its rim. Leaphorn let his eyes drift. It was a big room, two high windows facing east and two facing west. Someone, years ago, had curtained them with a cotton print of roses on a blue background. Big as the room was, its furniture crowded it. In the corner, a double bed covered with quilts; beside it a worn 1940-modern sofa; beyond that, a recliner upholstered in shiny blue vinyl; two other nondescript overstuffed chairs; and three assorted chests and cabinets. Every flat surface was