'Hunh?'
Drawing at the reins, he made the bridle seem to walk off the counter.
'Hey, stop!'
He turned at the door. 'Another time, perhaps.'
'Hey, by Gawd!'
All the Indians streamed out, with the trader after them. Laughing Boy was off at a gallop, his wife and Jesting Squaw's Son close behind. The rest followed, whooping and swinging their ropes and whips. Narrow Nose stood in the sand.
'Hey!'
Inside the store, Stinks Like a Mexican collected some tobacco and a handkerchief. He slid through the door, and vanished around the corner of the house.
'God damn a red devil!'
The Indians went fast; already their singing was distant. It was cold. He stuck his hands into his pockets and stared after them.
'God damn a red son of a bitch!'
14
I
It began to snow on the morning of the third day of their trip home, not far from Kintiel. The ground, where it had any dampness in it, had been frozen since the night before, and they had hurried under a threatening sky, having still a good day's ride before them. The storm came down like timber-wolves, rushing. A mountain-top wind sent the dry flakes whirling past, stinging their ears and the sides of their faces; there was no sun, they could see only a few yards ahead of them. Pulling their blankets up over their heads, they guided themselves by the wind at their backs.
An Indian takes the weather passively, accepting and enduring it without the European's mental revolt or impatience. Comfort and fat living had changed this to some degree in Laughing Boy; he was unusually aware of discomfort, and resentful, rating the blizzard as colder than it was. Slim Girl was simply miserable. They did not speak, but jogged on, punishing their horses.
Time passed and the wind slackened, so that the snow about their ponies' hooves stayed still, although the fall of flakes continued. Laughing Boy was preoccupied with thoughts of the road, but his wife contrasted this ride with the other time when they had ridden this way together. First it is the top of a stove and then it is an ice-machine, she thought; yet I am beginning to love it.
Cliffs loomed before them, duskily blue with snowflakes rebounding and zigzagging before they touched the rock. The snow was beginning to drift.
'These are not the right cliffs,' he said; 'the wind must have shifted, I think. I was afraid it would.'
'What shall we do, then?'
'I think this is Inaiyé Cletso'i; we follow to the left.'
'Why not camp here?'
'We must find firewood. We might just sleep here and not wake up. Come along, little sister, perhaps we shall find a hogahn.'
They continued, he fully occupied, she miserable with nothing to do save follow. Sometimes the snow whirled up at them, sometimes a flaw would sting their faces with fine, white dust. Their heavy blankets felt thin as cotton over their shoulders.
'There's a hogahn.' She pushed forward.
'Hogay-gahn, bad. Do not stop here!'
'What do you mean?'
'Don't you see it is deserted? Don't you see the hole in the north side? Some one has died here. Come along.'
She sighed in anger, gritted her teeth, swore under her breath, and turned her horse back. Nothing on earth would make a Navajo stop there; he would not even use the dry timbers for firewood to save his life. Well, it was part of the rest.
'We are coming somewhere now,' he called to her.
'How?'
'I smell smoke. There, you can see.'
It was a well-built hut beside a corral. Smoke issued from the hole in the roof. The dome of daubed mud and untrimmed logs looked beautiful just then. Laughing Boy shouted at the door, and a middle-aged man crawled out.
'Where are you going?'
'To Chiziai.'
'You are out of the trail; it is far.'
'This snow confused us.'
'Where from?'
'To Tlakai.'
'Where's that?'
'Between Seinsaidesah and Agathla.'
'Ei-yei! You come far! Just beyond, there, is a box canon. There is shelter and feed. Put your horses there, Grandfather. Drop your saddles here, I shall bring them in. Come in, Grandmother.'
They lost no time over the horses, and crawled gladly into the smoky, fetid, warm hogahn. There were the man, two women, four children between eight and fifteen, and two dogs. The space was a circle some twelve feet in diameter—the average size; with the people, the fire in the middle, saddles, cooking utensils, a loom and blankets, it was well filled.
'You live at T'o Tlakai?'
'No, at Chiziai. My parents live there. There was a Night Chant; for that we went. It was a full ten days' chant. Mountain Singer conducted it.'
'Beautiful!'
'Yes.'
The elder wife served them a pot of boiled mutton and corn, with a chunk of the usual tough wheat bread. They ate readily. It flashed through Laughing Boy's mind that he had not enjoyed a meal so much since his arrival at Tsé Lani, but then he thought that that was silly. The foods to which he was accustomed!
II
They were storm-bound for all the next day. He was anxious to be home again, now that the restraint of the ceremony and after-ceremony was ended. He wanted to have Slim Girl to himself, at leisure, and to enjoy their own special kind of life once more. So he was impatient and ready to find fault.
It was a long time since he had been confined in a winter hogahn, with its crowded things and people and close-packed smells. Their house at Los Palos was always aired. At T'o Tlakai it still had been warm enough to leave the door unblanketed during the day, and he had spent most of his time in the brush-walled medicine-lodge. He found it too close here, and was made self-conscious by fearing what she might think of it.
The modern Navajo diet, boiled mutton and tough bread, tough bread and boiled mutton, a little corn and squash, coffee with not enough sugar, tea as black as coffee, had none of the delicacy of the old ceremonial dishes. He went outside only on rising, when they all rolled in the snow (it had never occurred to him to warn Slim Girl of that custom, but she followed suit without a sign), and again for half an hour to look at his ponies. The thick air inside weighed upon him; he felt dull after a heavy breakfast, and had no more appetite.
Then there were the lice. His wife had rid him of them, conquering his sincere belief that they were a gift from Old Couple in the World Below to enable people to sleep. He had rated that as one of her minor magics. No new ones had got on to him at T'o Tlakai, but in this crowded place they stormed him. He was not used to being bitten, so he was tormented, and he scratched a great deal.
His host asked him naively, 'You have many lice, Grandfather?'
He caught his tongue in time, answering, 'No, but they nearly froze yesterday. Now they have waked up again, and they are hungry.'
Slim Girl gave him a look of approval and sympathy, with a little gesture of scratching furiously at herself. He smiled.
The afternoon and early evening were better, for his host re-counted the second part of the Coming Up story to his children, the part about the Twin Gods, Slayer of Enemy Gods, and Child of the Waters, which Laughing Boy loved best. He noticed that Slim Girl listened intently. Some day he would be telling his children. It seemed a long time for them not to have had any, but he really did not know very much about these things. It was the woman's business; the children were hers, after all. She would arrange it in due time, according to her wisdom. He drowsed and was soothed by the tale of the familiar, strange adventures, the gate of the Clashing Rocks, the trail over Boiling Sands, Monster Eagle and Monster Elk and Big God, lightning-arrows and cloud-blankets. After supper the close air drugged him; his eyes were nearly closed as he listened to the last of the myth.
The snowflakes, drifting through the smoke-hole, fell into the fire with little hisses. The even voice went on, telling the end.
'Slayer of Enemy Gods came to the Hunger People, they say...'
But it was not his dream, t
here was nothing portentous about this voice. Slim Girl had slain the Hunger People. He smiled and listened, cradled in drowsiness, distantly conscious of a louse biting him, and comforting himself with the thought that to-morrow all that would be attended to, to-morrow they would be home again. These poor people, they could not know. He half-opened his eyes, seeing his wife's thoughtful, delicate face, and said, as sleepy people will, much louder than he realized,
'Hasché Lto'i!'
'What was that, Grandfather?' asked the man.
'Nothing.'
'I thought you said something about Hunting Goddess.'
'No, I said "hashké yei itei," the gods are brave.'
'Unh! That is well said.'
Slim Girl reflected. Hashché Lto'i was one of the few real goddesses, but she had nothing at all to do with the Coming Up story. He had covered his slip neatly, that man of hers. He was no child. They two would go far, far, under her direction.
The story-telling ended, and the flakes had ceased falling through the smoke-hole. To-morrow would be clear. The banked fire became a dull redness, scarcely glowing.
III
They covered the fifteen miles home at a racing pace, on a morning of clear, brilliant air and dry, fresh snow. They both felt glorious, released from the cramped hogahn, glad to be approaching their goal. Though she had no great endurance, Slim Girl rode well, and now, with their ponies prancing in the cold, played tricks and frolicked on horseback as Indian men and women rarely do together. They both yipped and waved their arms; she snatched his hat, and threw it for him to pick from the ground on the run; he swung low under his pony's neck and sent an arrow skimming ahead of them. Before they reached it, the special quality and privacy of their home reached out to them, and they were almost definitely conscious of reentering their own way of living as though one entered an enclosure.
He admired anew the fireplace, with its smokelessness, its draft that set the flame quickly blazing, the heat thrown out from its shallow back. She prepared food while he tended to the ponies. The house became warm, but the air was sweet, the adobe walls and clay floor were clean, and now, with lively appetites, they smelt the good food cooking. She sat back from the fire while things stewed and bubbled. Kneeling beside her, he kissed her—to him perhaps more than anything else the act symbolic of their life apart—and they smiled at each other with grave pleasure. For a minute she was limp in his arms, then she pushed him away with an affectionate, scolding word and returned to a pot that was boiling over. He lay back on the sheepskins, watching. Domesticity, his wife, his home, perfection.
The loom-frame hung near the door; on the other side was the anvil. The place was permeated with an excited happiness, fulness, completion. Had any religious-minded Navajo, sensitive enough to the reiterated doctrine of hozoji to feel it without words, entered that place, he would have felt that he had, indeed, entered the 'house of happiness.'
15
I
The winter passed as swiftly as the summer; more so, in fact, for, feeling more sure of herself, Slim Girl consented to a social life. They went to various dances, becoming better known among the Southern Navajos, who began to accept her as entirely one of themselves. Learning with practice better and better how to avoid being different in a way that troubled others, she was able to be one of them without the fatal appearance of reserve and effort. By a slow process, she saw, Laughing Boy really was bringing her back into her own people. She consented out of policy to undergo the Night Chant initiation, the scourging with yucca leaves, the demonstration of the masks, and having done so found, surprised at her own naïveté, that it was a genuine source of satisfaction to her. Knowing that something of the true substance was forever lost to her, she surrounded herself as much as possible with the trappings of Navajo-ism.
There were obstacles and interruptions: a double life carries heavy enough penalties, and a past is a past, particularly if its locale is much the same as that of the present. Red Man, the wrestler of Tsé Lani, sophisticated and self-willed, was present at many of those dances. Slim Girl had never given him more than hope, and even that, he felt, more because he served a purpose than for anything else. She had used him. Now she belonged to this rustic, who had humiliated him, and who obviously did not know what it was all about. Red Man was too good an Indian to bear much resentment for the wrestling defeat, but it served the purpose of preventing him from amusing himself by explaining to Laughing Boy just what he knew about his wife. Besides, he shrewdly suspected, such a recital would be dangerous in the extreme.
So he adopted an attitude of smiling implications, of 'I could an I would,' that was as effective as possible for making trouble. Laughing Boy remembered the dancing at Tsé Lani, and he felt disturbed. Watching Red Man, it came upon him that, remarkable though his wife was, she was subject to the same general laws as other people, and he was fairly sure that he was not the first man she had known in love. Many things suddenly aligned themselves in a new way to assume a monstrous form. He became very quiet, and thought hard.
Slim Girl saw it immediately, not knowing what he was thinking, but feeling the reality of her peril. At that dance, she paid no attention to it, continued as ever, and treated Red Man with cool friendliness. At home, she managed to bring him into the talk, told Laughing Boy how he had sought to marry her once, and described with entire truth an ugly scene with him at Tsé Lani. Her husband listened, and was gladly convinced.
Her past was her past, he thought; he knew enough of her to know that it had been more than unhappy, and that she had put it resolutely behind her. There was much suffering, many bad things, of which she never spoke. Some day, perhaps, she could tell him. In any case, he believed what she did say, and even had the case been otherwise, that was all dead.
The next time they met, he contemplated the man, and guessed at the dimensions of his soul. Taking an opportunity when they both were taking horses to water, he rode up beside him, sitting sideways on his barebacked pony, one hand on the mane, one hand on the rump—a casual pose for a careless chat. Red Man greeted him non-committally.
'Grandfather, let us not run around things, let us not pretend,' he said. 'You have not said anything, but you have said too much. Do not pretend not to know what I mean. If you like what you are doing so much that you are willing to fight about it, go on. If not, stop it. I say, not just do less of it, or do it differently, but stop it entirely. That is what I mean. I have spoken.'
Red Man studied him; he was plainly in deadly earnest. He might just as well have acted instead of spoken—those men from up there have not yet realized the power of police and law. Among Navajos, the reasonable and acceptable way to have done, had he acted, would have been from ambush. Red Man felt he had had a narrow escape. He emphatically did not like what he was doing that much. Time would inevitably bring sorrow to the fellow.
'I hear you, Grandfather.'
II
These occasional absences of from three days to over a week made complications in Slim Girl's arrangements with her American. His trips in to town from his ranch were made on business that was, as often as not, conjured up to excuse himself to himself for seeing her. Each rendezvous would be arranged the time before, or by a note left in the little house, which she was supposed to visit at fixed intervals. Now it was occurring, as never before, that he would demand her presence on a certain date, only to be told it was impossible. Increasingly, as her love for her husband gained upon her, he suspected part of the truth, and tormented himself with jealousy. That husband, whom he had always regarded as rather mythical, seemed in the past few months to have become exacting. In moments of honesty towards himself, he writhed at the acid thought of being used by a squaw for the benefit of herself and some low, presumably drunken, Indian.
He rode into Los Palos through the bottomless mud and wet of a spring thaw, only to find a note on the table:
DEAR GEORGE
My husband make me go too dance I will come day after tomorrow afternoon, pleas n
ot mind.
love
LILLIAN
The poor fool cursed, got drunk, and waited over.
That had been a very pleasant dance; they had ridden part of the way home with as likable a crowd as the one that rode from T'o Tlakai to the trading post. She still tasted the flavour of it as she changed into her Sears-Roebuck dress and set out for Los Palos. Laughing Boy had surprised on her face, once or twice, that look of triumphant hatred when she returned. He would have been astonished could he have seen her now.
She looked back on their house, on the corral and the still leafless young peach trees, visualizing the dance, her people, and him. Her face was tender, almost yearning. Then she turned away towards the town, and braced her shoulders. For a moment she smiled, a war-path smile, and she was hard. Her upper lip curled back, showing her small, even, white teeth. Then her expression was blank; that passive look upon her oval face that made one turn to it again and again, wondering what deep, strong thoughts were going on behind the lovely mask.
He was in the house before her. She braced herself again at the door, then blotted everything from her eyes, becoming a happy, pretty woman with nothing on her mind. He rose as she entered. He did not answer her smile or move to touch her; that meant there would be a scene. Oh, well!
'Look here, Lillian, this is getting too thick. Here I come in here just to see you—we made the date, didn't we?—and you've gone prancing off to some dance. It won't do. I don't ask so much of you, but you've got to keep your dates, do you see? Don't make me suspect you...'
She hated scenes, loud voices, turmoil, protestations. God damn this man. Juthla hago hode shonh. She sat still, looking at him with wide, hurt eyes and drooping mouth. By and by he ran down.
Laughing Boy Page 13