The Solomon Note

Solomon Sialo’ekk and I have understood each other for a hundred years without ever fully agreeing about anything.

He runs his sub-coterie from inside the Rez, which is my territory, and he does this with my knowledge and with the specific quality of tolerance that is not permission but is not prohibition either. What we share: the refusal to let go. In his case the idiom is the house and the ledger - he believes that every debt clears, that the house always collects, that the scales come into balance eventually if you are patient enough and the house is yours. In my case the idiom is the dead - I bind, I hold, I keep the unresolved from lying down until it has been resolved. Both of us are saying: nothing escapes what it has earned.

We are also both, in the terms the Witnesses would use, the same category of thing.

I have not said this to Solomon. He has his own cosmology and it does not include the encounter in the canyon and the five hundred years of carrying that encounter. He would understand it, probably, in the idiom of the house: some debts the house cannot call. Some accounts stay open because what they record is outside the ledger’s jurisdiction. He would nod and find it familiar in structure and we would still not be having the same conversation.

Abuela walked through.

I learned it secondhand, the way I learn most things that happen in Solomon’s territory: through the quality of change in the dead he keeps, which reached my awareness like a temperature drop, like the specific silence that happens when something very loud stops suddenly. The ledger had moved. A row had closed that I had thought was the kind of row that stays open - and not in the house’s favor.

I understood what had happened before I heard it confirmed. John had come. The cosmological signature of a presence like that is not mistakable to me - not the specific figures I had not been able to approach in the canyon, but the same category of thing, the same quality of radiance that my five-hundred-year-old cursed sense can detect from whatever distance it reaches. Something that does not die the way I do not die, but by a completely different mechanism. Something that came for Solomon’s childe and took her somewhere I cannot follow.

Somewhere I have not followed, which is a different sentence.

This is the thing I sit with when I sit with the Solomon Note, as I have come to think of this accumulation: not ignorance. Inability is the wrong word too. I have been backing away from that light since a hidden canyon in the 1520s. Five hundred years of clear knowledge about what the backing-away has cost me. I know exactly what I am not doing. I know exactly what the category of thing is that I have been walking away from for five centuries. I know it with as much precision as the Hopi knew what I was when they expelled me from the mesas - the same precision, the same accuracy, applied to my own unresolved position.

And then Abuela - who did not know the path, who had not been walking the dead corridor for five centuries accumulating names and verdicts and the specific weight of the unanswerable - walked it.

She did not know she was teaching anyone. I have thought about this often. The most informed being in the Southwest, and the clearest instruction of my five centuries came from a woman I never met who did not know she was a teacher.

Solomon lost the wager he made when he embraced her. He lost it in the direction he had not considered.

I have been thinking about that ever since.