Susan J. Kroupa has lived on both the Hopi and Navajo Reservations. She has a degree in music and has worked as a music reviewer, columnist, and freelance journalist. She is the mother of seven children and currently resides in Orem, UT, where she is working on a historical fantasy novel set in Hopi culture. "The Healer" originally won first place in one of the quarterly Writers of the Future contests in 1993 and first appeared in Writers of the Future Vol. X
Movi watched the red juice run down the corners of Johnnie Begay's mouth as he sat against the stone wall of his house eating a melon. Her own mouth was dry with longing for a taste of it, but Johnnie merely grinned at her, spat out the seeds, and then dipped his face back into the juicy red pulp, smacking and slurping.
A big piece. Big enough to give a few bites away without missing them. The day was hot, too, even in the shade cast by the row of houses. It wasn't as if, whenever Nan gave her a pouch of parched corn, Movi didn't give him half of it, scrupulously counting out the pieces so they would each have the same amount.
A stunted yellow puppy, its skin stretched tight over its bones, sidled up to Johnnie, who was too engrossed in the melon to notice. Movi wondered whether to warn him, but the dog moved before she decided, snapping off a good-sized chunk of the fruit and barely missing Johnnie's nose.
"You maggot-brained coyote!" Johnnie kicked at the dog, which shied out of reach and then sat down, tongue hanging, eyeing Johnnie and his melon. Johnnie gave the dog a murderous look, then set the melon on the ground.
"Keep an eye on it," he said to Movi. Grabbing a handful of stones, he took off after the dog, his shouts and the dog's yelps mingling into one sound as they tore round the corner towards the plaza.
Movi looked at the melon. It was mostly gone, less than half left, the half that should have been hers anyway. Johnnie had kicked some dirt on it when he chased off after the dog. She picked it up and brushed away the dirt, her fingers sticky with its sweetness, then licked her fingers, dirt and all. That was a mistake, because it only made her tongue ache for more. Deep red, the melon was one of the last of the season. No more until next summer, and Johnnie was going to come back and eat every bite.
I'll just eat it, she thought, and raised the melon to her mouth but grew suddenly self-conscious. The eyes of the houses bored holes through her. She clutched the watermelon to her side and bolted between the houses out to the trail that led down the mesa. She had every right. It was her share. Johnnie owed it to her. She half-jumped, half-slid down the steep trail, knowing that a false step could mean a broken ankle. When she was about a third of the way down, she heard a shout. Johnnie stood at the edge of the mesa above her, arms flailing, yelling something unintelligible, though she had a pretty good idea what he was saying.
And then to her horror he twisted and swayed on the mesa's edge and pitched forward over the cliff, his scream cutting through her. Then he hit the ground.
With a little sob, Movi dropped the melon and tore back up the trail, then turned and ran along the face of the cliff until she came to where Johnnie lay crumpled on his side, his head twisted unnaturally. Blood flowed out his nose, lining the corners of his mouth where the watermelon juice had run earlier. At first she thought he was dead, but when she put her hand against his neck she felt a faint pulse.
A pulse, for what? To push the blood slowly out of his body, to drain away the traces of life that were still in him? She couldn't think, but stared at him without hope. She had meant only to take his melon but along with it she had stolen his life. She stood and looked toward the trail, wishing for help but dreading the explanations that would have to be made. And then a voice behind her said, "Crush me."
Movi whirled around. But no one was there. She turned back to Johnnie, watching him closely. Could he have. . .?
"Crush me."
Johnnie hadn't moved, hadn't spoken, she was certain. She turned again, heart pounding, and slowly looked in all four directions. Nothing.
"Crush me against the rock with your hands."
Then, on top of a boulder the height of her knees, she saw a wolf spider, as big and black as a tarantula but smoother and more delicately built.
"Crush me and heal the boy."
"I don't understand," said Movi.
The spider didn't answer.
"Help me," Movi cried. "I don't understand."
She thought of her hand against the flesh of the spider and shuddered. As if it read her mind, the spider began moving away from her.
Johnnie was dying and it was her fault and the spider was just walking away.
"Help me!" she screamed at it, and her anger rising, black as the spider. She bent over and thrust her hand against it, feeling the crunch as its body gave way beneath her weight.
She stood there shaking, staring at the dark stain on her hand, then pushed her other hand against the pulp on the rock.
Crush me and heal the boy, it had said. She knelt beside Johnnie, her hands black with the spider's lifeblood, and laid them on his head.
"Heal." It was a command, a plea, a yearning, a prayer.
The blood cleared from Johnnie's nose and mouth.
Movi moved her hands to his neck, still skewed at an impossible angle.
"Heal," she whispered. And Johnnie's neck straightened. Slowly she worked her way down, touching every part of his broken body with her own hands bloodied from the spider's broken body.
Before she finished she heard shouts and running footsteps and knew that others had finally come to help. But she couldn't stop. Her hands compelled her. She couldn't stop until his body was whole. At last, she lifted her hands from Johnnie's feet and raised her head, only to see Nahutiwa looking down at her, his face rigid with anger.
He had not come alone, and Movi recognized Johnnie's mother among the others with him. Johnnie moaned, opened his eyes, and then sat up. Nahutiwa's eyes flicked to Johnnie then turned back to Movi. "What are you doing?" he asked. And, as if his voice had given them the permission, everyone began talking at once, their questions and accusations pelting her like stones.
It was too much. How could she explain it when she didn't know herself what had happened? Her very bones ached with exhaustion, more than if she had worked in the sun all day weeding corn. She wanted Nan's arms around her, stroking her hair and murmuring comfort, easing the strange grief in her heart.
She jumped up and with only a glance at the surprise on Nahutiwa's face, darted around him and the cluster of people. Back to the trail she ran, back up the mesa, to her own house, startling Nan who, after one look at her, opened wide her arms. Movi inhaled the familiar scent of corn dust and wood smoke and burrowed deep into Nan, safe once more
But safe in Nan's arms, Movi still heard Johnnie's voice as he had shouted after her hoarse with anger.
"Thieving white witch!"
Now she wondered what he had meant. Why had he called her white when everyone knew her mother had been Hopi? And did the healing of Johnnie (the spider's healing, really) make her a witch? Pressing deep into Nan, she asked her, then felt rather than saw Nan's frown and long sigh.
It was time for a new story.
"I tell you, she's a two-heart."
Johnnie was showing no effects from his fall, thought Nahutiwa. He was talking non-stop as they walked slowly back up the mesa. But Nahutiwa hardly heard him. Johnnie, healthy, vigorous after his fall off the mesa was an example of a type of power Nahutiwa had never had, and the envy of it burned like hot coals in his stomach.
"She stole my melon and then ran down the mesa, and when she heard me yelling at her, she took the form of a whirlwind and pushed me off the cliff."
Nahutiwa doubted it, but Johnnie's mother and aunt, flanking him protectively, made shocked exclamations.
"You should bring it up at the council," said Johnnie's mother, a sour-faced woman with a reputation for laziness. "We don't need a two-heart here in the village. She can go live with the whites."
"And where is that?" asked Nahutiwa dryly. As angry as he was about Movi, it seemed to Nahutiwa that Johnnie and his family were manifestly ungrateful.
His question brought silence even from Johnnie because no one knew. Delbert Polacca's son was the only one who had left the village since the war, and he had never been heard from again.
Johnnie finally found his tongue. "If she's a two-heart, she can find them."
"She's only eight, and she did save your life," Nahutiwa reminded him. Expulsion was as close as the village got to a death sentence.
"If she hadn't pushed me she wouldn't have needed to," he said so callously that Nahutiwa wondered, not for the first time that morning, why Movi had bothered. He was relieved when they reached the top of the mesa and separated.
He came to his house and stopped at the stone box beside his door. The women of the village often left food here, payment of sorts for the services he gave them. Inside the box, with its heavy stone lid, the food was safe from the half-starved dogs that gleaned the streets. He pried off the lid and was rewarded by the sight of some corn tortillas and an earthen bowl full of mutton stew.
He carried the food to his table, a crude affair with twisted juniper legs that sent his mind back to the pre-war days of his childhood. Formica tables, microwave ovens, and food that knew no end to its variety. In his memory, that way of living seemed more magical than the crystal he used for healing.
Movi hadn't used a crystal. As far as he could see she hadn't used anything. A lifetime he'd searched to find stones that held healing power and an eight-year old girl did it without anything.
Last week the twins had suddenly returned to his dreams and now he knew why. He had thought that a half-white girl wouldn't be a threat Ñ the only talent the white people had was for war, not healing. He should have remembered, though, that twins came from the antelope people and that a child such as Movi, formed from twins, had the antelope people's healing powers. How could he have been so blind?
Because on that night eight years ago he had had no choice. Nan had made sure of that, challenging him in front of everyone in the room. The crystal had left him no choice either, for to have refused it when its warmth told of healing would have been to cut himself off from its power. And he had come close to doing that very thing. He thought, grudgingly, that he ought to be grateful to Nan for preventing him, but he still didn't trust her, those dark eyes that saw too much.
He opened one of the tortillas, still warm, and poured some of the stew into it, his mind reeling with ways to discredit Movi and the healing. Given Johnnie's attitude, it wouldn't be hard. Why should she steal away the respect and power he had worked a lifetime to earn?
And then, he remembered how she had bounded past him and run up the mesa Ñ as frightened and as agile as if she were indeed an antelope. Thin and dark, with nothing to show her father was white, she hadn't looked like a witch or a great healer. She had just looked scared. Nahutiwa stared at his plate and sighed. It was too complicated. Was he supposed to fight a child?
He rolled the tortilla around the stew and took a bite, but found, after all, that he had no appetite.