Fifteen years ago, rabbit hunters discovered a corpse in a cornfield.
The dead man was Retha Letseoma’s husband, Pershing, who had been missing for three months. She would never know for sure how or why he died. He’d walked out of the rock house he shared with her and their five children one day in October, promising he’d return soon. Instead, he’d vanished. Letseoma had searched for him for days, combing through villages atop rocky, buff-hued mesas on a 1.5-million-acre swath of land belonging to the Hopi Tribe in northern Arizona.
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After Pershing’s death, Letseoma and the kids moved into her parents’ three-bedroom, two-bath HUD home in Kykotsmovi, Arizona. When Letseoma was growing up in this house, her father had farmed and ranched and had owned horses, cattle, sheep, and chickens. There had always been enough food in the house, and plenty of firewood and coal to fuel the family heating stove during icy winter nights.
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