The Man to Send Rain Clouds: Contemporary Stories by American Indians

“They found him under a pig cottonwood tree. His Levi jacket and pants were faded light blue so that he had been easy to find. The big cottonwood tree stood apart from a small grove of winter-bare cotton- woods which grew in the wide sanely arroyo. He had been dead for a day or more and the sheep had wandered and scattered up and down the arroyo.”

In the first lines of the story, Silko begins to draw the readers’ attention to the Pueblo people’s embrace of tradition and modernity. Teofilo is one of the only characters that Silko describes in detail with his “Levi jacket and pants.” Her focus here on Teofilo’s jacket and clothes foreshadows Silko’s continued descriptions of clothes in the text.

“Before they wrapped the old man, Leon took a piece of string out of his pocket and tied a small gray feather in the old man's long white hair. Ken gave him the paint. Across the brown wrinkled forehead he drew a streak of white and along the high cheek bones he drew a strip of blue paint. He paused and watched Ken throw pinches of corn meal and pollen into the wind that fluttered the small gray feather. Then Leon painted with yellow under the old man's broad nose, and finally, when he had painted green across the chin, he smiled.”

Ken and Leon are prepared to commence with Teofilo’s burial rites from the moment that they find his body. Their preparation displays how dedicated they are to continuing with Pueblo tradition. Leon’s smile parallels his happiness at the end of the story when he finishes the burial rites properly.

“‘Send us rain clouds, Grandfather.’ They laid the bundle in the back of the pick-up and covered it with a heavy tarp before they started back to the pueblo.”

The motif of rain clouds begins here and continues to the end of the short story. Leon’s direct address to Teofilo is almost like a Christian prayer. He speaks to his grandfather as though he is still alive; this suggests that he believes in Teofilo’s continued existence in the afterlife.