Navajo Territory

A necromancer walks into Navajo lands and finds no dead.

That is not quite what happened. Let me be more precise, because imprecision here would miss the thing that made this stop the most alienating of the road. There were dead. There are always dead. The question is what kind of dead - what has been left behind when the life goes out, and what has been taken with it when the life goes on, and what the ratio is.

Navajo country, in that century, was full of chindi.

You understand what I mean by that if you know anything about how the dead are handled in that place, in that tradition. When a person dies, two things happen. The good that accumulated in that life - the harmony, the rightness, the learned balance - goes somewhere I could not follow then and cannot follow now. It leaves. I do not know where it goes. I cannot speak to the dead who have resolved their lives into something clean and whole; they are done and they are gone and my necromancy finds no purchase there, which is its own kind of information about what my necromancy is.

What stays behind is the chindi: the dark residue, the grief and the anger and the harm that could not be healed, the things that calcified around whatever wound had not been dressed in life. The Navajo knew this about their dead. They were careful about it. You leave the hogan when someone dies in it; you do not speak the dead person’s name; you move so that the chindi does not find you, does not attach, does not give you ghost sickness from the accumulated weight of what they could not take with them.

I walked into Navajo country and I found only this: grief’s leavings. Anger’s residue. The part of the dead that had not been able to resolve itself into the going-away that was not available to me.

I had full capacity. I am telling you this so you understand that what I found was not a matter of weakness in the reaching. I was searching with everything I had, because by the time I reached Navajo territory I had been on the road for two decades and I had learned to read the dead with more skill than I had possessed in the obsidian cave under Tenochtitlan. I was at my best. And what my best found was grief that could not finish. Harm that had not healed. The dead who had not been able to leave cleanly, held in the territory by exactly the kind of weight I can lift and carry but cannot dissolve.

I am the jailer of such things. I always have been. This is what I am made for.

But I had spent two decades hoping that what I was made for was a service to the dead, and Navajo territory taught me something precise about the difference between service and capacity. I could hold the chindi. I could speak with the chindi. The chindi spoke back, and what they said was what dark leavings always say: the thing that was not finished, over and over, in whatever register their grief had fixed itself into.

What they could not give me was what I had been hoping to find - the dead who had resolved, who had chosen, who had made peace with what they were and what they left behind. The dead who might have known something about the thing I saw in the canyon. The dead who had continued, somewhere, in the going-away that I cannot reach.

Those dead were not here. Or they had been here and were now gone. What remained was the residue. And the residue had no knowledge of light.

I was not expelled from Navajo territory. Expulsion requires a verdict, and the chindi do not make verdicts - they only repeat the last unfinished thing. I left because there was nothing there for me to do that was not a kind of consumption: holding the dark leavings, feeding on what remained, becoming exactly the category the Hopi had named and expelled.

The gone and the going of it. The dead who had resolved themselves into something clean and the echo that was left when they departed.

I had never in twenty years of the road felt as unnecessary as I felt in that territory. Not threatened. Not named. Not even expelled. Simply - not needed. The dead there had sorted themselves without me. The good had gone. The harm remained. My specific competency, applied to the harm that remained, would do nothing for anyone.

I walked faster through Navajo country than anywhere else on the road. Not out of fear. Out of the understanding that my presence here was a surplus, not a service, and surplus in the territory of the dark leavings was a description of what the Hopi had warned about.

I went south and west. I followed the pull of something I could not name but could feel: a site, a node, a place where the dead were thick and willing and waiting for exactly this conversation.