Ceremony

Ceremony Summary | Detailed Summary

Silko begins this story with a condensed version of the Laguna Indian creation myth:

Ts'its'tsi'nako, Thought-Woman

is sitting in her room

and whatever she thinks about

appears . . .

Thought-Woman, the spider,

named things and

as she named them

they appeared.

She is sitting in her room

thinking of a story now

I'm telling you the story

she is thinking

Tayo is a half-breed born of a Luguna Indian mother and an unidentified white man in Gallup, New Mexico. His mother is homeless, and his earliest memories are of the men who come in and out of their corrugated tin shelter in an arroyo outside of town, and of sleeping under the tables in a local tavern when his mother would go off with some man or another. At four years old, she takes him to her home in the Laguna Pueblo and leaves him with her family, a group of proud and respectable Lagunas, where he grows up under the resentful care of her sister. Auntie had not wanted to take him, but she was overruled by her mother, Old Grandma, and her brother Josiah. She continues to resent him as she cares for him and always communicates to him that he is not quite acceptable. Old Grandma is also a part of his growth, as well as his Uncle Robert and his Uncle Josiah, both of whom treat him with kindness and affection. Josiah plays a major male figure role in his life, and Tayo loves and admires him as a father. When Tayo's mother passes away, Josiah stands with him at the funeral and holds his hand. The most important member of the family is Rocky, Auntie and Robert's son, who is near Tayo's age. The two have a brotherly relationship growing up in the Laguna Pueblo.

Rocky is a star. From academics to athletics, he excels at it all, and Auntie has great hopes for his future. He intends to break tradition and leave the Pueblo when he grows up. Auntie, sent to a Catholic boarding school as a child and now a convert, has nursed a cold anger at her younger sister, Tayo's mother, because she has disgraced the family and has thrown her life away on the streets of Gallup and elsewhere. So Tayo grows up in ambivalence, without a mother in his life and with constant reminders by the woman who has taken her place that he does not measure up. Because he is in the Pueblo and is part white, he is treated as not quite acceptable, but he is not accepted in the white community either because he is part Indian.

Josiah carries on an affair with a Mexican woman, a further embarrassment to Auntie, but Night Swan is an extraordinary woman who fills an important place in his life. Auntie feels that he is also damaging the family's reputation, not just because the affair is illicit but because the woman is Mexican.

He loves Tayo and spends a lot time with him, taking him along when he is going from place to place in his pickup. He takes him to bring water from a spring one day, telling the boy about their heritage and where they came from. The boy's half-breed heritage does not matter to him. He also tells him how important the spring is because sometimes the rains don't come, and this water source keeps the animals alive.

At the recommendation of his Mexican paramour, Josiah decides to buy some cattle. He purchases not Herefords, which other ranchers own, but a tough desert breed that can tolerate the long dry spells that occur from time to time in this part of New Mexico. Tayo helps Josiah separate the good cattle from a large herd when they make their purchase. The cattle are unloaded, and Josiah finds them beautiful. They immediately take off to the south, however, with Josiah and his nephew racing after on their horses in an attempt to keep track of them. The wild desert cattle have little regard for fence and just force their way through them. Josiah assures Tayo that they will settle down after a few days. The cows wear Mexican brands, but Josiah decides that they should bear Auntie's brand. They then round them up and put new identifiers on them. He feels that he has made a good deal, and he and Tayo are going to work together to build the herd.

After borrowing books about cattle breeding from the extension agent, Josiah and the boys read them together and discuss the information. Tayo sees that Uncle Josiah's cattle are nothing like the ideal cows in the books. They are tall with long thin legs like deer, their heads are long and angular, and their eyes are big and wild. Uncle Josiah concludes that they will have to make it up as they go, maybe writing their own book about raising cattle on Indian land. Rocky is contemptuous because he says that's the problem with the Indians — they never know what they're doing. Auntie sides with Rocky, of course. It gives her a chance to make an unkind remark about the influence of the "dirty Mexican woman" that Josiah is seeing.

As the boys finish high school, World War II is raging. Rocky is enticed to enlist by an Army recruiter, and sweeps Tayo along with him. He tells the recruiter that Tayo is his brother and that they will enlist if they can stay together. The recruiter observes the difference in their appearance and is skeptical that they are brothers. Auntie does not want Tayo to go, as Rocky is the one who is supposed to go off and do something. Tayo has promised to stay home and help out on the ranch, but now he promises to bring Rocky back safe. "You don't have to worry," he tells her.

They find themselves in the steamy jungles of the Philippines fighting the Japanese. The killing and the horrors are too much for Tayo. He keeps seeing Josiah in the faces of the Japanese and, even though Rocky forces him to look in the faces of the dead soldiers and see that they are not their uncle, Tayo cannot accept it. They are captured, then Rocky is wounded and is carried out on a makeshift stretcher by Tayo and a corporal from their battalion. Tayo keeps confusing the Japanese with people he has known back home. One of the Japanese soldiers then comes and uses the butt of his gun to crush Rocky's head as he lies in the blanket that had been improvised as a stretcher. Tayo screams and collapses, but is supported and saved by one of the other soldiers.

He survives the war physically, but not mentally. His injuries are not the typical war injuries, nor are his symptoms typical; he has not lost a limb, nor has he become impotent as happens to many veterans of this kind of military action. His mental disorientation is not unusual, but the illness is in his belly and not in his head. He vomits, as he cannot keep food down, and is kept in the military hospital for months under medical care intended to cure his illness, then is finally released to make his way home by himself. Once on the street waiting for the train to come, he finds himself very weak but just thankful that now he will be allowed to die in peace. Ironically, a Japanese/American woman with two small children helps him. The man in charge of the depot comes to his aid, and he vomits until he cannot vomit anymore. He thinks the small Japanese boy whose mother has helped him is Rocky. When he eventually gets on the train, he then makes his way back to the home where he grew up in the Laguna Pueblo.

With Auntie taking care of him, he vomits constantly until he is so weak that he can't get out of bed. He lives in the room where he and Rocky have grown up, and Rocky's bed remains there next to his own. To make matters worse, Josiah died while he was gone. He had died pursuing the cattle.Tayo feels that it is his fault because he wasn't there to help him.

Recalling Josiah's visits to Night Swan, Tayo remembers that she would watch him when he accompanied his uncle. He also recalls a time when the rains finally came and his uncle sent a note by him, telling her that he could not keep a date they had made. She had seduced Tayo that day, a special memory for him, but he never saw her again. Now he goes back to the room, now abandoned for some time, and tries to recapture some of what he has lost. He sits in the room, picks up a fragment of fallen plaster and draws dusty white stripes across his hands the way ceremonial dancers sometimes do. Now he knows why they do it -- it connects them to the earth.

He prefers his sleeping room dark, as he can avoid confronting the memories that surround him when the room is light. Old Grandma and Robert, too overwhelmed by his sickness and crying, cannot stand to come near him at first. Eventually, however, Robert begins to tell him about the ranch and the animals. Robert has always been a very quiet man who has lived a life owned by the women, including the good family name. With both Josiah and Rocky gone, all the responsibility rests on Robert, and he is tired.

Old Grandma comes to Tayo, takes his head on her lap and croons an Indian chant. He tells her he needs to go back to the hospital to be cared for by the white doctors. She objects, wanting to send for a medicine man.

The old medicine man Ku'oosh comes and tells him about a deep lava cave, one that Tayo and Rocky had visited when they were children even though Auntie had told them they couldn't. Rattlesnakes would be there in the spring; they went there to restore life to themselves. It was said that in the old days, scalps had been thrown into this cave. Now Tayo knows why the medicine man has come. The world is fragile, the old man tells him, as fragile as a spider's web.

Tayo tells him that he didn't kill anyone in the war, but he doesn't tell him that he had cursed the rain and that he was responsible for the drought that has descended on the Pueblo since his return. Even so, he asks the old man to help him just in case he might have killed someone without knowing it. The old man then chants and says, "I'm afraid of what will happen to all of us if you and the others don't get well," And leaves Indian tea and a bag of blue cornmeal. Tayo cries, trying to get rid of the pain inside him, then sleeps.

When Auntie and Old Grandma come back — they had gone away while the medicine man was there — they make him tea from the sticks and mush from the blue cornmeal. He manages to keep the tea and mush down, knowing that if this does not work he will die. He doesn't care anymore if he vomits or if he dies. The vomiting stops after the visit of the medicine man and the ingestion of his "medicine," but recurs when he is out drinking with his friends.

His childhood friends Harley, Leroy, Pinkie and Emo have also gone off to the war and have become serious alcoholics. Tayo drinks with them and remembers that as a soldier, he was accepted by the white people. White women would sleep with him and the other soldiers would treat him as an equal, but when the war was over they were back to being the unacceptables — the Indians. The other former soldiers do not want to hear this, particularly Emo. They spend their time drinking as they begin drawing Tayo into their circle. On one of these occasions, Emo tells stories of his exploits with white American women when he was a soldier as he plays with teeth of Japanese soldiers he has brought back from the war, something very upsetting to Tayo. The more Emo talks, the more Tayo's stomach knots up until he can stand it no longer. He breaks off the base of his beer bottle and goes for Emo, plummeting the improvised weapon into the other man's stomach, yelling "Killer!" Tayo feels that, somehow, he will get well if he can kill Emo. The police arrive, and Emo lives, but Tayo is sent back to the hospital. When he gets out, he resumes his drinking, but there is enmity between him and Emo. Tayo remembers that their tension stems from their childhood when Emo hated him because he was half white.

The family keeps sheep and hires a shepherd to care for them. While Harley had done this for a time, he disappeared one day and eventually turned up in a Los Lunas jail. The family found the sheep dog dead, killed and torn apart by wild animals, and the sheep scattered while the horse stood near the highway where Harley had left him, its saddle stolen. Then Pinkie is hired for the job, but lasts only a few weeks before he goes back to the useless life the young men are living — spending his government disability checks on his drinking.

At the recommendation of Ku'oosh, Robert takes Tayo to a medicine man who lives in the foothills and leaves him there. Tayo is frightened, as he believes he has been brought here to be killed. However, he begins to trust the old medicine man, Betonie, and tells him about his stay in the hospital, where everyone was white. "In that hospital they don't bury the dead," he tells Betonie, "they keep them in rooms and talk to them." He also tells him of his experiences in the war, of how he had believed that Josiah was there the day Rocky died. "He loved me, and I didn't do anything to save him," he said. Now he wants to know whether he had, in fact, let the cattle kill his beloved uncle.

The medicine man helps him to see that his illness is not his illness alone, that it is part of a larger illness, and it is related to the changes that have been brought about by the treachery of the white people. He tells him that the ceremonies have changed because the world has changed. From the old man's Hogan, they can see the white man's world, the cars on Highway 66, but Betonie says it is not simple. You can't write off all the white people, just as you can't trust all the Indians. You should not be so quick to call something bad or good. There are transitions; the world is changing, and the transitions must be cared for closely. All evil does not reside with white people, he tells him. They are only tools that the witchery manipulates, and the white people can be dealt with. He tells the Indian myth about the white people, that it was Indian witchery that had created them in the first place. He also tells him a myth that a very long time ago, the ancestors of the Indian people had been Oriental, coming to this country from Asia, and that when he saw his uncle's face and those of the people he knew back home in the faces of the Japanese it was because of their common heritage, not because he was crazy. Later, Betonie barbecues ribs. They taste good to Tayo, and he is able to keep them down.

The next morning, they go up into the hills on horseback. He performs a ceremony that involves a minor scalp wound deliberately inflicted on Tayo's head, walking in bear tracks and prayer sticks. He sleeps after the ceremony, and wakes knowing that he must go and find his uncle's cattle. Betonie tells him to find the cattle, that a heavenly constellation will be a guide, and that there will be a woman who will help him. The ceremony over, Tayo hitchhikes home and is picked up by his drinking buddies. He joins them and a girl they have picked up and they all get drunk again, but Tayo leaves them and vomits up all the beer he has drunk, trying to vomit up everything - all the past, all of his life.

He sees the pattern of the stars in the skies that Betonie has told him to look for, so he goes on the hunt for the cattle. He takes the truck and a horse but abandons the truck when there are no longer tracks. Now riding the horse, he comes upon a woman in a yard. She feeds him and they make love. He dreams of where the cattle, are and at dawn he sets off on the horse. He prays an Indian prayer about the sunrise. The woman feeds him breakfast, and he heads upward toward a plateau and finds the cattle.

They are behind a fence so sturdy that they cannot get through, as they had done when they had run away from Tayo and Josiah. Using his tools, he makes a hole in the fence large enough to drive the cattle through, then gets on his horse and goes to get them. A mountain lion comes when Tayo and his horse are resting, but it only comes and looks into Tayo's eyes, then turns around and leaves.

After finally finding the cattle, Tayo herds them toward the hole in the fence, knowing that if he can get them turned they will go through. Just as he sees them emerging through the hole in the fence, his mare stumbles and both fall, knocking Tayo unconscious. When he comes to, two ranch hands are standing over him and asking him where he had been going so fast. They accuse him of poaching deer or even of rustling. One goes to get a truck to take him out to the police, but when the man returns he says he has seen lion tracks. The two decide that a mountain lion is more valuable than Tayo and they leave him. He finds a shallow depression, covers himself with leaves and spends the night there. As he walks downward from the plateau the next morning, he hears a man with a buck across his shoulders singing a Laguna chant. He tells Tayo that the cattle are probably down below.

They go back to the house where Tayo had found the woman, and his mare has also returned there. The woman is there with the cattle are in her corral, a natural trap on an arroyo that runs from the rim of the mountain. All she had to do was close the gate after them. He takes them home and Robert helps him get them into their own corral.

He dreams of the woman as if she were with him, and he and Robert work together to prepare the ranch for winter. One day, he tells them that he is moving to Josiah's ranch for good. The woman, whose name is now revealed as Ts'eh, comes to him there but she warns him that he now has enemies and that they will try to capture him and take him back to the hospital, so he flees into the hills. One day he at the cave, however, his drinking buddies find him. He joins them and drinks, telling himself that they are his friends and would not be in on the conspiracy to take him back.

After drinking all night, they go away and Tayo finds his way to a crater that was made when agents of the government had mined for uranium years before and is now abandoned. He is struggling with the realization that his friends, lead by Emo, are, in fact, the enemy and had been coming to get him. They come back after dark and park below the crater. He disables the car they are driving, takes a screwdriver from it with him for a weapon, and climbs into the boulders above the crater. As he watches, Emo, Pinky and Leroy take a badly wounded Harley out of the trunk and torture him because he has refused to go along with their plan to capture Tayo. Tayo struggles with the desire to go and protect his friend as they torture and kill him, but the other three get into a fight where Leroy kills Pinkie, and Tayo accepts that there is nothing he can do. Later, Old Grandma reports on their deaths, though no one is ever blamed for them.

Tayo understands that the ceremony is not over. He must find his own peace, and it does not lie with the three Indians who have been a part of the sickness that afflicts him.

After Tayo returns to his family and is fully functioning and participating in the ranch's work, they hear that Emo has killed Leroy in an "accident" with a gun, and that he has been banished from the Pueblo forever and has gone to California.

Tayo goes back to Ku'oosh to finish the ceremony, and Old Grandma sends a pot of chili and frybread for their feast. The story ends with another Laguna chant:

Whirling darkness

started its journey

with its witchery

and

its witchery

has returned upon it.

its witchery

has returned

into its belly.