I watched a phainopepla, a sleek black bird, serenade the neighborhood from the top of a bush, just barely visible over the roof of my grandmother’s house. I spied a kind of oriole, fluorescent orange, in a distant tree. A jay with a blue jacket and a gray belly perched on a branch above my head. I thumbed through the bird identification app on my phone: a western scrub jay, which inhabits the dry shrublands and pinyon and juniper forests of the West. Toro seemed unfazed by its loud, raspy call, but I apologized on our behalf. “I don’t have any food for you,” I said.
My aunt opened the back door and poked her head outside. “What are you doing out here?” she asked, surprising me.
My face burned red. “Just watching the birds,” I said.
My aunt gasped loudly, and I quickly set my bowl of cereal down. I wasn’t sure if I had done something wrong. But she ran past me and across the yard to a row of trash cans along the fence. “The stupid crows!” she yelled, gathering pieces of cardboard—the torn blue boxes from the Bud Light she’d bought in town—that had been strewn across the ground. She shoved the boxes, along with torn-open bags of food, back into the trash. “This is our personal business,” she growled.
She disappeared into the house, then returned with a bottle of lighter fluid to set the can alight.
I tried not to laugh. I had forgotten and would not remember until much later that the reservation was dry, and that alcohol was not legal to buy or transport onto the Navajo Nation’s land.
My aunt walked over and sat down next to me as the trash fire burned. “Do you pray?” she asked.
I shook my head.
“Let me teach you,” she said. She stood up and gathered a pinch of dirt in her hand. “This should be corn pollen,” she said, self-consciously. “But. You’re supposed to pray, every morning at dawn. You pray to the four directions.” And she closed her eyes and lifted her chin. “I walk with beauty before me,” she prayed. “I walk with beauty behind me. I walk with beauty below me. I walk with beauty above me. I walk with beauty around me.”
She motioned for me to stand, and she squared my shoulders toward the sun. “I walk in beauty,” she coaxed me to say.
“I walk in beauty,” I said, watching a cliff swallow swoop down to enter its nest, which it had built on the side of my grandmother’s house. “I walk in beauty,” I repeated, watching a cloud of bluebirds flit between the neighbor’s bushes and the fence. “I walk in beauty,” I repeated, reaching down to stroke Toro’s head. “I walk in beauty,” I repeated for the fourth time, listening to the phainopepla herald in the dawn.
* Bible study notes. April 11, 2008. “ ‘The vain regrets of yesterday / Have vanished through God’s pardoning grace; / The guilty fear has passed away; / And joy has come to take its place.’ CHRIST REMOVES OUR GUILTY PAST AND GIVES US A GLORIOUS FUTURE. And I am looking forward into Danielle Geller as a proud mom to have such a lovely daughter. You dear are my blessing in my heart.”
them supposeable being
GROWING UP, MY mother told us very little about her family. We didn’t know our grandparents’ names, or how many brothers and sisters she had. We weren’t told when new cousins were born, or when her own parents and brother died.*1 After she met my father, my mother left her home and her mountains, her family and her future there. She once told me the only way to leave the reservation was to join the military or to marry off, and she told me never to go back.
The only things I knew about my family were the few things she told me when I visited her in South Florida. She told me that my grandfather was a medicine man and that her sister, my aunt, was a witch.
“She practices black magic,” my mother said. Then she caught my eye and held my gaze, because I didn’t dare look away. “But we’re healers, baby. You have to use your magic for good.”
If you are Diné, this next story is not, perhaps, a story you will want to read.
* * *
—
VISITING THE REZ felt eerily similar to visiting my mother in Florida. While my aunties and their friends partied, my cousins and I slumbered in front of the television and waited for the call that would jolt us awake—the call to pick them up, ferry them around, and feed and coax them into their beds at the end of the night.
One night, after we dropped off my aunt at her friend’s, my cousins and I decided to drive down to Gallup to see a movie in the theater. We borrowed my aunt’s truck; I offered to drive. The reservation glowed like the surface of the moon.
“I’m sorry about my mom,” my cousin-brother said suddenly, but quietly.
“Don’t be,” I said. “My mom was the same way.” I told him about the nights in Florida that I spent shuttling her back and forth between her house and Sneakers, her favorite dive bar.
“Yeah?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I promised.
As we passed Sagebrush, the liquor store that sat just outside the border of the Navajo reservation, my cousin-sister popped her head out of the back seat and told her brother I didn’t believe in skin-walkers. Her voice was laughing, incredulous.
I looked into the rearview mirror, into my cousin-sister’s shining eyes, and then at her brother. “Do you?” I asked.
He seemed reluctant to speak. I knew very little about him, but I did know he had been living in Phoenix since he turned eighteen. And by virtue of his off-reservation-ness, I hated to admit, I trusted his opinion more than my cousin-sister’s.
“I don’t know,” he said, sliding his palms over his thighs, “but I’ve seen some things.”
“Like what?” I asked. I stared at the edge of the road and watched for rabbits, for coyotes—for what, I wasn’t sure. The only animal I had seen on the reservation at night was a cow, a fat brown-and-white steer whose head hung stupidly into the road. But there was a chill in my blood—the same feeling I had when I was a girl sharing ghost stories in the darkness of a hurricane blackout.
“Like eyes,” my cousin said. He was in the mountains at night with some friends when he heard a sound in the woods. Then he saw two red lights, like embers burning in the dark.
I told my cousins that my mother had told me their mother practiced black magic.
My cousin-sister laughed. “That’s what my brother’s ex-wife says. That’s why he can’t see his kids no more. She says we’re all skin-walkers.”
* * *
—
WHEN MY SISTER and I were little, we played a game we called “animals.” We pretended to be horses and took turns vaulting over the ottoman on all fours, or we pretended to be lionesses and groomed our arms with our tongues. After Jurassic Park was released, the entire neighborhood played dinosaurs. The oldest boy claimed T. rex, and I became the queen of the raptors. Our youngest siblings were relegated to prey, the gazelle-necked Gallimimus of the open fields.
We stopped playing animals after we moved to Pennsylvania. We were too old, and the girls we met at school weren’t interested in pretending to be horses and dinosaurs, though I still often crawled around the house on all fours.
In middle school, I told my best friend, Sherri, that my Indian grandmother had cursed me when I visited the reservation as a child. I told Sherri a wolf’s spirit took over my body on full moons. All the wolf craved was flesh and blood.
I can’t say Sherri believed me, but she certainly played along.
If I signaled the change with a growl, she would take off running. I followed her shrieks through the neighborhood, and she always ended up back at my apartment, where she yelled at Fran that I had tracked her home by the scent of her blood. Fran kept a giant stuffed banana plushie tucked behind the TV hutch, and she would whack both Sherri and me with the banana until I, laughing hysterically, changed back into the girl I had always been.
I did not realize what I was claiming to be, or why it might be taboo.
* * *
—
&nbs
p; YOU AREN’T SUPPOSED to talk about skin-walkers. Stories inspire fear, and fear makes them stronger. Fear draws them to you, like blood draws sharks in the water.
Still, the stories are told. In Diné Bizaad, a skin-walker is yee naaldlooshii—“with it, he goes on all fours.” In some stories, skin-walkers are described as animals, coyotes, wolves, or owls, with evil red or yellow eyes. In others, skin-walkers are half-animal, half-human, adorned with antlers or skulls or animal pelts. Skin-walkers acquire their powers of transformation through black magic; through the most evil of deeds. And though they can use their magic to cause harm, most of the stories about skin-walkers that persist in legend sound like hauntings: A skin-walker dashes in front of a car’s headlights, or taps on the window of a moving car, or climbs onto the roof of a home.
The accounts of skin-walkers vary, but in the stories I read and am told, one thing remains constant: During the day, yee naaldlooshii walks around in human skin.
* * *
—
THERE ARE TWO stories about the way Pauline Tom, my great-grandmother, died.*2
The way my aunt tells it, Pauline Tom fell at night in her own backyard. She froze to death in the middle of winter because she could not crawl home, and no one heard her cries.
The way one of my grandmothers tells it, Pauline Tom’s injuries were not sustained from tripping and falling. When the coroner examined her body, he said the injuries she sustained made it look like she had been dropped from a great height. “There are things out here,” my grandmother said. “Evil things.” Things not easily explained.
* * *
—
I ALWAYS CONSIDERED my mother superstitious. She told me it was bad luck to wear a ring on any finger but your ring finger. She told me that if you saw an owl during the day, someone close to you would die. She told me not to keep the image of a wolf in my house, because it would bring bad luck. She told me to never stare at the moon.
My cousin-sister and I visited the Navajo Nation’s zoo, and I was surprised to find a pair of great horned owls perching on an old tree in broad daylight. According to the placard in front of their exhibit, they had been injured on the road and rehabilitated by the zoo.
When I told my cousin-sister what my mother had told me about owls, she laughed. “I never heard that before.”
My aunt held an entirely different set of superstitions. She told me if you didn’t eat spicy food, it meant you were a jealous person. She told me to never buy an animal or I would become poor.
I could not make myself believe in the superstitions my mother held.
I could not make myself believe in yee naaldlooshii.
My aunt and my mother stopped speaking before my mother died, I believed, not because my aunt practiced black magic but because they disagreed about how to care for their families best.
My family is not full of skin-walkers. It feels more complicated than that.
But one night, my cousin-sister and I woke up to the sound of something scrabbling on the roof. She reached for my arm under the blanket.
“It’s probably a raccoon,” I whispered.
“How did it get up there?” she whispered back.
I imagined a friendly masked face with bright eyes and fuzzy ears; I imagined turning on the light and making us safe. Then I remembered a story my aunt had told us of a tall figure she saw through the window at night, and I could not make myself get out of bed.
*1 March 1, 1995. “I LOVE YOU” MOM. REMEMBER YOU STILL TOUCH MY HEART
*2 Three; Bible study notebook, March 20, 2008: “Grandma Pauline you now with God and the rest of our family. You are no longer suffering.” And from March 22, 2008. “I started this day with the fact that I lost my best friend Pauline Tom my grandma.”
[Exhaustion]
IN TOTAL, I spent only six days on the reservation for my mother’s memorial service. The days felt much longer. I had begun to feel like a small, nervous dog, always ready to bolt out of danger, but also, always longing to please.
My aunt drank more than I expected, and each time she opened a beer, she said it was an exception, as if looking for absolution. Of course, Auntie. Have another. Let me join you. But after the carrots, I did not drink again.
My aunt didn’t seem to want to talk about my mother. She stopped sharing stories with me. After the memorial service, she lost momentum, and she spent long hours sitting in the kitchen alone, with tears leaking constantly down her face.
One night, one of my aunt’s neighbors and her nephew came over to visit. The nephew was twenty-something years old, around my age, and visiting from Portland, and our aunties seemed to want to hook us up. They cajoled us into taking a photo together, and before she snapped the picture, my aunt pulled my hoodie down to expose my bare shoulder. “Show a little skin!” she laughed.
After they left, my aunt passed out in her room, and my cousin-brother and I staked out opposite couches. He turned on the television, but neither of us watched what was on. We were too preoccupied with our phones.
Portland asked me for my number, and my aunt pressured me to give it to him, though he wasn’t quite my type. He was a little too skinny, a little too feminine, and a little too cool for me. I gave him my number because I was lonely, even surrounded by my family, and I wondered what he thought about returning to the reservation after living so many years away.
He sent me a message, asking me what I was doing.
Just watching TV, I told him, then added, If you want to come over, we could hang out for a little while.
Are you drinking?
Not tonight, I said. I told him I was the DD, in case someone needed a ride.
Well, he said, it’s late. I don’t think you have to drive now.
I set my phone on the coffee table and chewed on the edge of my nail. I knew I should just go to bed. I watched my cousin-brother stand and walk out the front door. I lay down and pulled one of my aunt’s heavy blankets over me and stared at the television, though my eyelids started to droop. I picked up my phone and sent him another text, telling him we could do something the next day.
My phone dinged. We’re on our way! he wrote. My aunt wants to hang.
I panicked. My aunt is asleep, I told him, but he didn’t respond again.
I jumped off the couch and ran outside, but I stopped short when I saw my cousin-brother standing at the corner of the house beside two tall figures. The red end of his cigarette flared in the dark.
I walked slowly toward them, and he introduced me as his cousin to two of his friends. They said quiet hellos.
“That guy from Portland is on his way over,” I said, nervously. “I told him everyone’s asleep—”
My cousin-brother sighed and, shaking his head, turned away from me.
A car pulled up in front of the house. I walked down the driveway to meet them. Portland’s aunt barreled out the passenger-side door with her little son balanced on one hip, two bottles of beer held in her other hand.
“My aunt’s asleep,” I told her. “I don’t think you should come in.”
“I have my son with me,” she yelled. “Where am I going to take him?” Then she pushed past me toward the house.
“Sorry,” Portland said, walking around the front of the car. “She got in a fight with Gramps.”
We walked slowly up the driveway, past my cousin-brother and his friends, and back inside. His aunt sat on the sofa, the hem of her T-shirt tucked under her chin. Her son clung to her breast and nursed as she tipped a beer toward her mouth. She told us to sit by the fire.
I led him across the living room and into the old garage, which was more of a storage room and separated by only a curtain, bundled to one side. We sat beside the wood-burning stove, though the fire had already burned down.
“So, you’re from Boston,” he said. His eyes wandered, drunk-lost.
/> “Yeah,” I said. “I’m just visiting for my mom’s memorial.”
He tilted his head to the side. “I’m sorry.”
“Oh my god,” his aunt complained loudly from the couch. “You two are so boring. Give me something to watch.”
Taking her cue, he leaned in to kiss me. He smelled like cheap beer, but his hands were gentle on my face. I returned the kiss, a peck on his bottom lip, but turned my head away.
“My family is trying to convince me to move here,” I said, trying to change the subject. It was a fleeting comment my aunties and grandmothers had been making throughout my visit—after the memorial service, one of my grandmothers had told me about an opening at her school’s library and had given me her work email to send her my résumé.
“I wouldn’t if I were you,” he laughed. “But look where I am now.”
The little boy suddenly appeared at my side; his hands stretched toward the stove. I grabbed him and pulled him into my lap. I thought he might act as a barrier between me and Portland, but even with the boy in my lap, Portland ducked his head in to steal kisses on my lips and my cheeks and my forehead.
“It’s crazy,” he whispered near my ear, “that the two of us would meet here like this.”
I stayed quiet. He was looking for a love story, and I was looking for something else. Something I couldn’t quite figure out, myself.
A door opened, and my aunt stumbled out of her bedroom. “What are you doing here?” she yelled when she saw her neighbor on the couch.
“My nephew!” she yelled back, motioning toward the two of us.
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