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Show -4- When she reached the house she found Granny piling the baskets and ollas in the yard. Matias was squatting by the fire, eating his bowl of beans and getting beans in the corners =of his mouth. Rosa washed her hands again, got a bowl and spooned out some beans for herself. Grandmother had waited on Matias. He was almost a man now, and that was the way it had always been. The women waiting on the men. But Rosa'd had to get her own beans. It was just another stupid tradition. Like the jam. She glared out across the desert at the saguaros again. It was light enough now that she could make out the clusters of deep red fruit at their very tops. Each spring the saguaros were crowned with waxen, white flowers that bloomed and fell, leaving pods that ripened until, in the hottest week of summer, they burst open, exposing the fine, seedy fruit to the blaze of the sun. It was then that the Papago. went to work. That week was set aside for picking the fruit and cooking it down to make jam and to make syrup for the special wine that the medicine men used in their rain-making ceremony. It was a time steeped in tradition. Nothing <;.can« easily to the Papago. Even the fruit that the Great Provider had given them to pick had been put atop spiny shafts, many of them thirty feet above the ground. But as with so many things in life, the solution was contained in the problem. The Papago cut away the tough wooden ribs of the dead saguaros, the only thing that was long enough, and used them to make kuibits, or cutting poles, which they used to pluck the clusters of fruit from their high perches. Rosa saw them now, stacked in a bundle at one side of the house. She put down her |
