Changing Woman Ways
By
Conda V. Douglas
Damnation Books, LLC.
P.O. Box 3931
Santa Rosa, CA 95402-9998
www.damnationbooks.com
Changing Woman Ways
by Conda V. Douglas
Digital ISBN: 978-1-61572-258-7
Cover art by: Julie D’Arcy
Edited by: Pam Slade
Copyright 2010 Conda V. Douglas
Printed in the United States of America
Worldwide Electronic & Digital Rights
1st North American and UK Print Rights
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned or distributed in any form, including digital and electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the Publisher, except for brief quotes for use in reviews.
This book is a work of fiction. Characters, names, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
This story is dedicated to the memory of my dad, Luther A. Douglas, who lived with the Navajo and always said, “They were my first and best family.”
Changing Woman Ways
When she saw the coyote, Mora knew she’d made a mistake. Her hands ached, the scars at the side of her palms burning.
“Let’s turn back,” she said to Anne. With only a faint hope that Anne would agree. After six months working as an assistant for Anne, the new director of the new Navajo Heritage Museum, Mora knew better than to suggest anything to this Navajo. She regretted agreeing to accompany Anne on yet another buying trip for ‘authentic’ items for the museum. Mora wondered why Anne seemed determined to travel out to a remote hogan on a freezing desert night.
“Don’t be an idiot. We’re almost there,” Anne said. She jerked the wheel of the old pickup, trying to avoid the deepest ruts.
The coyote ran alongside, keeping an easy pace with the jouncing, swaying vehicle. Mora admired the sleek lines of the animal, silver-gray in the moonlight, the long muzzle in profile.
“There’s a coyote following the truck,” Mora said. She hoped this would persuade Anne to turn back. Now that her hands made her want to whimper with their heat, she wished she was back at the museum, cleaning and cataloguing. It had seemed simple when they’d started out. Drive to the hogan, bid on and buy the loom, and head back. Everything on the reservation seemed simple until experienced.
“A coyote? I suppose you think that’s bad luck, eh, inside-out apple?”
Inside-out apple, a want-to-be Navajo. Mora winced at the jibe and perhaps at the truth of the words. As if, with her blue eyes and freckled face, she could somehow assume a Navajo skin. What little she knew of the Navajo, she had captured out of the corner of her eye. Stare at them, and their lives shifted away.
“This loom will be a centerpiece in the opening,” Anne said. “Don’t forget that the success of the opening determines whether we’ll get a grant to continue—and your salary is part of that grant.”
Mora washed her hands one over the other, seeking to ease the pain. She remembered seeing her first Navajo sand painting. The gods captured in sand, masked so that none could see the power of their gaze. The sides of Mora’s hands had ached with her desire to touch the gods. Mora had wanted to paint the desert with part of the desert. She wanted to paint with sand. She’d traveled to the reservation and found the job as assistant, so she could live within her paint box, the desert sands.
“Still want to turn back?” Anne asked.
Mora thought of her dreams as blowing away, a sandstorm. She said nothing.
The coyote rolled one yellow eye at her before veering off into the underbrush. Mora wondered what her policeman friend, George, might say. Would he denigrate her fears, like Anne, or would he understand?
“Why not build a new loom?” Mora asked. “I mean, who would be able to tell the difference?”
The traditional looms consisted of a few logs: two supporting beams and two cross beams, easily created in a couple of hours. Deceptively simple, with no clue to the complex patterns the weaver created upon the loom.
“This loom is different,” Anne said.
“Different, how?”
“You’ll see. We’re here.”
The hogan squatted in the middle of the desert, little more than a rounded dirt shape, like a hillock of a garbage dump piled with dirt.
“It looks abandoned,” Mora said.
“Auntie Aggie never was known for her housekeeping.”
“It looks like a death hogan.” Mora knew the Navajo hated any talk of death.
“That’s ridiculous!” Anne didn’t even wince at Mora’s words.
If it hadn’t been for her square, solid body, like a chunk of granite with flat Navajo features, Mora would have doubted Anne was Navajo. For the trip out into the desert, Anne had worn a dark green woman’s business suit, the skirt the correct fashionable length for the season, and high heels. High heels in November, with snow on the ground. The suit softened and modernized the lines of Anne’s body.
Though the Navajo interpreted their five sacred colors loosely, green was not one of them. There was brown, black, white, blue and red in the desert, but not green. With her short hair cut, curled in the newest style and her heavy makeup distorting her broad, elongated features, Anne looked like she belonged in the Anglo world. Anne’s only concession to the cold autumn night and her heritage was a Pendleton blanket tossed over her shoulders. The bright stripes of the blanket clashed with Anne’s suit, as if the modern and traditional warred on her body.
“Even if there’s somebody there, won’t we wake them?” Mora said.
“Not if they’re dead. What are you afraid of—ghost sickness?” Anne mocked.
Being near the dead caused ghost sickness.
“I’ve already got ghost sickness,” Mora said. There, that ought to give Anne pause.
Mora pulled off her fur-lined gloves, hoping the cold air would soothe the pain along her palms, where her sixth fingers used to be. Not for the first time she wondered, if the surgeon hadn’t sliced away those fingers hours after her birth, if they might have worked. Thirty years later, she still experienced ghost pain. Stress-related, the doctors said.
Mora remembered the Navajo belief in ghost sickness, that a dead person’s spirit could return and disease the living. The ghosts of my fingers have returned to haunt me with pain, she thought.
Anne parked the truck as close as she could to the hogan, next to an antique wagon that was little more than kindling. A light came on in the one grimy window of the hogan and flickered, a candle. Anne turned off the engine and with it the heater. Mora hoped the traditional wait would not be too long. Custom meant they waited until the old woman, Auntie Aggie, came to her door to welcome them.
Again Anne surprised her, by opening the truck door and letting in the cold desert air. She hopped out, graceful despite her high heels. Mora clambered out after her.
“She won’t sell us the loom if you insult her!” Mora called.
“Relax, I used to live here,” Anne said. She glided to the door and, without knocking, went in.
Mora followed. She paused and studied the door. It looked as if it was patched together from old wooden planks, with large gaps between the planks. The bitter wind moaned through the holes. How could the old woman survive the winters in such a hovel? In
side, the dirt floor had been brushed so many times, the floor was now several inches below the threshold. The walls had been covered with sheets and blankets a time long ago, so now they hung in dirty tatters.
An ancient wood stove filled the center of the room―a black monstrosity with its grimy pipe fitted into a hole at the top of the hogan. The cold stove gave off an odor of old sheep fat. This surprised Mora. In her experience, even the poorest of Navajo kept their homes clean, cozy and comfortable. This place didn’t seem habitable. Had Anne grown up here?
Auntie Aggie dominated the one-room hogan as she sat in front of her white pine loom. Perhaps it was because the old woman sat still and silent, as if an old painting frozen in time. So fragile and frail that she reminded Mora of a sand painting scattered upon the floor, easily blown away with a puff of wind.
“Auntie Aggie,” Anne said, “I’ve come for it.”
Auntie Aggie looked up from where she sat in approved Navajo woman fashion, her legs to one side, tucked close to her body. Over long johns and torn men’s overalls, she wore a Pendleton blanket in the same pattern of stripes as Anne’s—with one difference, Auntie Aggie wore the grubby blanket like a royal mantle.
Mora wanted to engrave the woman’s image on her mind so she could sand paint her later. More striking than her seamed, long face and deep-set black eyes was Auntie Aggie’s hair. She wore her hair in the traditional style, borrowed from the Pueblo by the Navajo centuries ago. A double knot of hair sat at the nape of her neck, nestled there like some long-furred animal. Auntie Aggie’s head gleamed with white hair, while the double knot still held strands of black and gray hair, so that it looked like a separate entity. It was tied round with a long strip of black rag.
Mora wondered about the black rag. Color signified a great deal to the Navajo, and usually the double knots were tied with white cords. Black belonged to the north, where evil dwells, and black protects secrets. What was Auntie Aggie hiding? Or was it only some individual quirk of the old woman?
On the loom an unusual and elaborate pattern of white circles and ellipses on a black background lay almost completed. The phases of the moon recreated in a stark relief.
“I’ve never seen such a pattern,” Mora whispered. The variety of the rug patterns always surprised her. The Navajo clung to the old traditional loom form, then created a vast array of diverse patterns: dancing gods, familiar scenes, and geometric patterns. A good weaver was an artist.
“She never finishes it,” Anne said. “Always she weaves and never finishes it.”
“The pattern looks like the phases of the moon.”
“Yes, it’s the Changing Woman pattern,” Auntie Aggie said.
“Changing Woman? The one who ages with the year and is reborn in the spring?” Mora said, hoping she had the story right. She knew the folly of trying to conform Navajo ideas into Anglo thinking.
“Renewed is more like it,” Anne said. “Like the moon, she goes from old to new.”
Mora reached out and stroked the cold wood supports of the loom, hoping it might soothe the long ache in her hands. She wanted the loom, not for the museum, but for herself. Beneath her fingers, she felt the ridges and valleys of carvings. Looking close in the faint candlelight, she saw a string of coyotes, tail to head, circling around the white pine pole.
So this was what made the loom unique. Then she saw the prayer wands hanging from the tops of the poles. Coyotes, prayer wands, on a loom? Mora dropped her hands and backed away.
The old woman caught Mora’s gaze. She widened her eyes with amused knowing. “Don’t be afraid, Anglo woman. The loom will give what you ask for, if you pay,” Auntie Aggie said.
“Mora isn’t a tourist to be spooked,” Anne said.
Mora rubbed her hands together, scratching at the palms. What was she thinking of? She knew nothing about weaving. What would she do with an old loom?
Auntie Aggie spat.
“Let’s go,” Mora said. Pain cut at the sides of her hands like a surgeon’s knives. She didn’t want to ignore their warning. Or Auntie Aggie’s spitting, a way of warding off evil spirits.
Even Anne seemed disconcerted. She drew her blanket tighter around her.
“We don’t need a hand trembler here,” Auntie Aggie said. “No one is sick. Old, yes, dying, yes, but that can’t be cured.”
“Hand trembler?” Anne asked.
“Your Anglo friend,” Auntie Aggie said.
“Anglos can’t be hand tremblers.”
A few months ago, Mora would have agreed with Anne. The provenance of hand tremblers, magical diagnosticians of Navajo illness, belonged to them alone. Or so Mora had believed until coming onto the reservation. Hand tremblers, always women, discovered diseases by passing their hands over the body of the afflicted person.
Mora had thought it only a coincidence that often hand tremblers were crippled or maimed and that her hands missed their fingers. Coming to work on the reservation had brought those long dead and missing fingers to life, and Mora was learning to trust their pain.
Mora sunk her hands deep into her pockets, to keep them from the temptation of the loom. It seemed colder inside the hogan than outside, as if the cold of all the old woman’s winters had seeped into the walls. Mora hoped the negotiations didn’t follow the usual pattern of a long talk about something else and then slowly bargaining over price and trade.
“We’ll pay cash for the loom,” Anne said, then named a price that startled Mora. It was far too high. Or did Anne get a cut from Auntie Aggie? Was the deal already decided, the trip a joke on the foolish Anglo?
“No,” said Auntie Aggie.
Anne frowned. “You promised me the loom. Why shouldn’t I take it?”
What was going on here? Mora felt as if she’d stepped into the middle of Anne and Auntie Aggie’s life, into a conversation spoken in English, meant in Navajo.
Tacked to an upright strut of the loom, a photograph hung crazily askew. It was a black-and-white snapshot of a little girl dressed in traditional garb, the skirt and blouse and bright scarf. The velvet skirt, too large, hung in limp, tattered folds around the girl’s skinny legs. She held a large bowl in her arms, a bowl with a scattering of coins at the bottom.
Mora looked closer. “This is you,” she said to Anne. “What are you doing?”
“Begging,” Anne growled out the word.
Mora saw the deep scowl on the little girl’s face, the frown lines carved into her forehead, the rivulets of wounded pride around her mouth. Her rage.
“It wasn’t begging. We danced for the tourists, and they paid,” Auntie Aggie said.
For a moment, Mora feared Anne would strike the old woman, the anger in her face shone so dark. No one moved. Mora felt as if the hogan itself might crumble away, leaving the three women standing like mannequins in a museum exhibit. The three of them transformed into a crazy juxtaposition of old Navajo, new Navajo and confused modern Anglo. A centerpiece for the new museum.
“C’mon,” Anne said to Mora, “there’s nothing for me here. There never has been anything for me here.”
“You follow the Anglo way all you want, child. You’ll never find your way,” Auntie Aggie said. She threaded a line of white into the pattern.
Anne took hold of Mora’s arm and yanked her out of the hogan. Mora’s last glimpse was of the old woman laughing. She’d never heard a Navajo laugh so loud, and she wondered what had caused such an outburst. The laughter echoed in Mora’s mind as Anne drove them away.
* * * *
Auntie Aggie’s loom arrived at the museum two weeks later.
“Did you steal it?” Mora asked Anne.
At the word ‘steal,’ the workmen stopped hammering, banging, drilling and chattering. Mora and Anne had gained center stage. They made the best exhibit, a living one.
Anne took several short
breaths, expelling them with quick puffs, obviously a relaxation technique she’d learned in a management seminar. To Mora, it sounded as if she were in the final stages of labor. Looking around at the half-unpacked boxes of the new exhibits, Mora wasn’t certain she belonged in the delivery or wanted Anne’s vision of the museum, her baby.
“Auntie Aggie is dead,” Anne said, the hard angles in her voice matching the hard angles of her body. Granite.
Mora saw one of the Navajo workmen flinch, then edge away, out of the room. Speaking of death invites it to drop by and bring ghosts and sickness with it.
“Now help me set it up,” Anne said.
Mora didn’t want to touch the beams. She thought of Auntie Aggie’s mocking laugh and wondered what Auntie Aggie would think of her loom, here. Had Anne breached the taboo of a death hogan to retrieve the loom? She shivered at the thought of the dirty, cold hogan, and Auntie Aggie’s body laid in a corner, wrapped in her Pendleton blanket, her shoes on backwards to keep her from walking. Had Anne laid her out, then taken the loom as payment for doing so? Was Anne still Navajo enough for that?
“Why not ask one of the workmen to help?” Mora asked. Her hands itched at the sight of the carving on the beams. Coyotes dancing in a spiral. What could it mean?
“Look around,” Anne said. “They’re all afraid of ghost sickness.” The room, filled moments ago with seven busy workmen, now stood silent―deserted.
“What do they know that we don’t?”
“Superstition is what they know,” Anne said, and laughed. “Pick it up,” she ordered, lifting one end of the anchor beam.
Mora had no choice but to help Anne. What reason could she give for refusing? Mora consoled herself that the loom was so simple it shouldn’t take longer than a few minutes to erect. She lifted, and could feel the carvings beneath her hands.
“Lever it up, and I’ll settle it.”
Mora held the beam upright, her eyes shut tight. Heat burned in her hands, and her palms felt slick with sweat.
“Almost got it,” Anne said, as if sensing Mora’s discomfort. Then she swore, and the pole weight shifted, now heavier in Mora’s hands.
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