- Some more chanting.
- Betonie's chant says he will bring Tayo back through his hoops. Tayo will return home, walking in his footprints.
- Home equals long life and happiness. Good times.
- There's some more chanting about passing through beautiful nature on the way back home to happiness.
- But then the chant ends in a kind of weird way. The ceremony isn't finished.
- Tayo is home, but there's still a lot of evil on him.
- Betonie and Shush lead Tayo out of the house and tell him to sleep.
- Tayo dreams about the speckled cattle.
- When Tayo wakes up, he knows he won't have any peace until he finds the cattle.
- He looks down at the hills and mountains and recognizes them from the sand paintings of the ceremony he just experienced.
- Betonie comes over to smoke and tell Tayo a story:
- Once upon a time, Betonie says, when his grandfather Descheeny was an old man, a bunch of Navajo hunters were returning from the south.
- The old hunters sit and smoke and tell stories, but the young men want to go riding in the night.
- On their way back to the camp, the young men discover something in a piñon tree. A blue lace shawl drops to the ground.
- A young girl drops down from the tree. She looks about 12 or 13 and has green eyes. For some reason, the horses and the men feel afraid of her.
- No one wants to admit they're scared, though, so they take her with them, figuring they can get a good price for her.
- On the way home the next day, the old men realize they're in trouble. They can't just leave her behind, but they need to get rid of her. They plan to kill her as soon as they find someone who knows how to do it properly.
- They go to see old Descheeny, even though they know he'll charge them to get them out of this mess.
- Descheeny's wives go down to look at the girl first.
- Descheeny tells his wives not to give him any trouble or he'll marry the girl.
- The hunters try to pass the girl off to Descheeny, saying she's valuable, but she's slowing them down.
- Descheeny can see they are lying. He says he'll help them for two or three loads of meat.
- Descheeny speaks in Spanish to the girl, offering to take her back to her people.
- She laughs at him and basically tells him to stop playing games with her. They both know what her people will do to her if he takes her back.
- Descheeny's wives are upset because he sleeps with the Mexican girl every night. They don't like her because she's "alien," and they tell Descheeny to take her away.
- Descheeny takes the girl to his "winter house." It's not as fancy as it sounds—we think it's probably the hogan where Betonie lives now.
- Page break. Here we get a little love scene between the Mexican girl and Descheeny. But this isn't your typical pillow talk. The lovers talk about witchcraft.
- The girl can hear voices at night, speaking in different languages. She knows it's "them," and that "they" are working for the end of the world (XIX.26).
- The girl worries that the ceremony won't be strong enough to stop the evildoers. They have to depend on people who aren't even born yet. This is so epic.
- Betonie chides the girl for her impatience. This is going to take a long, long time and lots of stories.
- Before the couple starts . . . um, you know . . . doing it, the girl gets in a nice zinger about the old man's prowess in bed. You should totally check it out. (XIX.32)
- Page break. Descheeny isn't afraid to play with the old ceremonies in order to respond to the new evil. Other medicine men send him the patients they can't cure.
- Descheeny's logic is that since the evil was set loose by the witchery of the whole world, and it was brought to them by the whites, the ceremony to stop it must be the same.
- The girl, as it turns out, didn't come to Descheeny by chance. She had come looking for him for his ceremonies.
- The girl says they must have power from everywhere—even the whites.
- Page break. The people tolerate Descheeny's experimentation for a while because he can cure things no one else can.
- But after the Mexican girl arrives, the people are too scared to come to him anymore.
- This doesn't bother Descheeny. He's too old to concern himself with individual cures. He's busy thinking about something bigger.
- Page break. This paragraph is in quotes, and it seems to be the Mexican girl who is speaking. She tells the story of her birth.
- When the people in the village saw her eyes, they took her to the Catholic priest, who told them to let her die.
- The people blamed the Root Woman for the birth and ordered her to get out of town.
- The Root Woman waited until the people were gone. Then she rescued the baby from the trash pile where the people left her and escaped to El Paso.
- Sometimes Root Woman laughed about how long she had to wait for the Mexican girl with green eyes in that village full of idiots.
- Other times Root Woman was bitter about how the people in the village treated her, after everything she did for them.
- That's the end of the Mexican girl's story.