Saying Grace

by Beth Gutcheon

  “When Navajo people first came here and found ruins of Anasazi people,” said Earl, “they did not disturb them because they were afraid to anger their ghosts. That is why they are so well preserved, two hundred years since Navajo people live here.”

  “So the ghosts turned out to be useful,” said Henry, apparently after a long silence feeling the need to say something.

  Earl didn’t answer, which Rue had come to recognize as Navajo good manners in the face of a remark too dumb to notice.

  When they came to a part of the canyon across from the White House ruin, where there is one trail tourists may walk without a guide, Earl greeted a group of young people in such a way that they paused, looking as if they’d been challenged for doing something they shouldn’t. But he passed pleasantly and greeted the next group the same way, and Rue recognized that his was the manner of a host. That he was greeting them exactly as she would a friend of Georgia’s whom she came upon unexpectedly in her own upstairs hallway. The canyon was where Earl lived. The tourists were guests. The people in their shorts with their cameras might feel entitled because they had paid to be there, but Earl clearly felt exactly as the Rockefellers in Seal Harbor did, on the days that they allowed the tourists to come in and tour the gardens.

  She began to hallucinate about leading Navajo tourists through the pine woods of her girlhood. “What’s this?” one would ask, and she would say, “Well, those are old lobster pots that belonged to my clan grandfather. After he died, his son Gordon started an old car graveyard here in the backyard. He had rusting hulks of automobiles piled up as high as the house, but then a man from Portland proved that engine oil was getting into the water table so Gordon had to pay to have them hauled away. Gordon tried to promise to hang them up on a hook first and drain them good before he put them on the pile, but no one believed he would.”

  She pictured waiting for someone to ask what Gordon wanted with an auto graveyard, and somehow knew that Earl, anyway, if it were he touring the scenes of her childhood and her father’s childhood and her father’s father’s childhood, would be too polite to ask. She had the strong sense that Earl was having to conceal the fact that she had committed some breach of Navajo etiquette every second time she opened her mouth. She was used to knowing the rules. To being rather an authority on the rules.

  If she had to choose one word to sum up the experience of this day, could she do it? “Awe” occurred to her. And “gratitude.” And increasingly, “pain.” She and Henry had each ridden with Earl for part of the afternoon, and once, for a stretch, with each other, but it had now been quite a while since they had exchanged a word. She wondered if his silence meant what hers did. They had been on horseback now for upwards of six hours and she had begun to feel that around each bend in the wash they would come upon the horse trailer waiting for them, or even (and she couldn’t imagine what this would look like) the end of the canyon, the corral among the cottonwoods where they had begun. But around every corner was a new stretch of canyon, teaching them about the endless variety of changes that could be rung on this one stupendous image. The towering red wall and the dappled sliver of wash beneath it, now narrow as a creek, now wide as a river, went on forever.

  Rue and Henry’s horses, either feeling their age or ready for a nap, dawdled slower and slower. To keep up with Earl they had to force the beasts into a trot, which Rue for one found excruciating now that she was so sore, and her bust and every muscle in her body hurt as they bounced. They were long since out of drinking water.

  They had been on horseback eight hours by the time they rode up a slight grade at the end of a long silent silver stretch of canyon. The sun was low in the sky and it made a streak of mirror of the water. Rue’s horse occasionally wandered into sink holes if she lost her attention and failed to follow Earl exactly. She pictured herself and the horse staggering over sideways and drowning in four feet of water, too tired to bother to save themselves. Perhaps Henry was trying to kill her. Perhaps Earl was trying to kill them both. If this were a sort of cultural retribution, she could recognize with her brain it was fairly witty, but was too tired and thirsty and incipiently nauseous to care.

  When they finally arrived at their room at The Lodge, long after they had ceased to believe the ordeal would ever end, they hobbled in, still in single file. Henry sat down, took off his boots, and got into bed with all his clothes on. Rue felt his forehead.

  “You’re hot,” she said.

  He said, “I’m freezing.” She got the quilted bedspread from the second bed and piled it on top of him. Then she went into the narrow bathroom, moving as if she were a hundred years old. She slowly and painfully took off her clothes and got into the tub, half afraid her arms and legs would buckle as she lowered herself, and she would drop and shatter. She turned on the water and let the tub fill around her, so that she could adjust to the heat as the water rose. She wanted to be immersed in water hot to the point of pain for about a month.

  When she finally came out, the bedroom seemed frigid. Henry was asleep. She hurried under the covers still half-dried, too easily chilled to wait to put on clothes. She too slept, and when she woke up she could tell by the light outside that it was nearly night.

  Henry was awake. He was lying on his back, waiting for her to wake up.

  “Well,” she said, “that was a lot of fun,” and they both started to laugh. It felt very strange to be naked in bed and hugged by a man who was fully clothed. She could feel the scratchy wool of his sweater and the cold of his fly buttons.

  “You’re a forgiving soul,” he said.

  “No, it was wonderful. The first four hours were maybe the peak hours of my life.”

  “I began to wonder if he was trying to kill us.”

  “Did you? So did I.”

  “At one point I looked back and saw that you were gray and I was frightened.”

  “I was thirsty,” said Rue. “I thought of asking you to get me a drink from the wash, but I didn’t want to be a wimp.”

  “I wouldn’t have let you drink that. That’s how you get giardia.”

  “Oh.”

  They lay holding each other. Rue cried for a while, because she had thought of Georgia and was too tired to hold it back. Henry knew what she was thinking and held her, and stroked her hair. After a while he said, “It’s night. Are you hungry?”

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “I don’t think I can move.”

  “Want some scotch?”

  To his surprise, she said, “Sure, a little.” So he walked, very painfully, with their brown plastic ice bucket out to the nearest ice machine. When he got back to the room, Rue was lying with her eyes closed.

  “I’m watching the day,” she said, and he knew what she meant. “It’s hallucinogenic. It’s so intense, those colors, all those images….”

  Henry put ice in plastic tooth glasses, poured them each some scotch, and got back into bed. They sipped very slowly and held hands.

  “This is nice,” said Rue after a while.

  “What?” Henry asked.

  “The scotch.”

  “You hate scotch.”

  “I know.”

  After a while she said, “I’m floating.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m so grateful for it. I’m floating.”

  “Shhh,” said Henry. She knew he was right. She knew he understood her to mean she was too hurt and exhausted to feel the other pain. He was afraid she would say it out loud, which would bring it all back. After a while Henry got up and took off his clothes, and it was very nice to be able to feel his hair and smell his skin. The skin of his face and neck smelled of sun, as if the cells were storing it. She felt close to him for the first time in months, at peace, as if the barrier between them was gone. After a while she fell asleep.

  Henry got up and poured more scotch. Then he turned off the light and got back into bed, and sat for a long while in the dark, feeling his wife breathing.

  They were sore to the point of paralysis in
the morning, but they forced themselves to move. They managed to get dressed, though it took three times as long as usual. Bending over to put on shoes and socks was agony, as it stretched the abused muscles of their thighs.

  “I can’t do it,” Rue said. “I’m going to breakfast in my slippers.”

  “I was thinking of going in my bare feet.”

  “We’re old,” said Rue. “Everything changes because everything should. Earl didn’t know; he’s twenty-five. He never spent a day behind a desk in his life. He didn’t know we couldn’t do that anymore, and neither did we. But now we do. That’s my deep thought for the day.” Henry smiled.

  They felt marginally better as they walked. The cafeteria was filled with schoolchildren on a field trip, already sugar high after choosing sticky breakfasts of sweetrolls or pancakes and syrup.

  “Fourth grade,” said Rue after one glance around.

  “Fifth,” said Henry, looking at a table of large boys. Rue shook her head and took a tray. She took a dish of stewed prunes, a muffin, and a pot of tea. An old woman’s breakfast, she thought, content. Henry ordered bacon and ham. As they were paying, they saw one of the chaperones of the group preparing to speak to a table of girls who were dawdling over their food.

  “Excuse me,” Henry said, “what grade is this?”

  “Fourth,” said the woman.

  Rue gave him a triumphant look. They’d been making bets with each other like this since the first week they met in Cambridge, twenty-five years ago.

  The feeling of unity and peace of the night before was still with them. It was fragile, and they were both feeling as if they had been smashed to pieces and put back together by someone who’d never seen a person in the flesh before. But the connection was there and they moved together as if on one spoon they were carrying the world’s most precious egg. If they could carry it and keep it whole, neither jostling the other nor faltering in any way, maybe things could begin to be as they used to be. They both knew that today would be a test.

  “What shall we do?” Rue asked as they walked slowly back to their room in the weak winter sun.

  “We could drive the North Rim. There are things to see from the Overlooks.”

  “I think I can manage getting in and out of the car.”

  “Good.”

  Henry drove. Rue sat close to him and touched his knee or the back of his neck from time to time. When she did, he kept his eyes on the road, but smiled. They both luxuriated in this physical reassurance that they were together and still breathing. Language would have been far more dangerous, so they didn’t talk much.

  They stopped at Antelope House Overlook. The parking lot was deserted. Entirely alone, they made their way over the rocky path, almost invisible at times as outcroppings of sandstone interrupted it, in the same way granite ledges broke through the soil in the fields and woods of Maine. But there was nothing familiar about this landscape. As they had the day before, they came suddenly to the lip of the canyon, and the drop, as before, made stomach and sphincter muscles clutch. You couldn’t look at it without imagining falling or jumping. Antelope House was named for the pictographs on a nearby wall, and they found they could see the ruins and paintings clearly, closer to them here on the mesa than they had been to any of the ruins they saw the day before from the canyon floor.

  “I’d give anything to be able to go into one,” said Rue as they peered over the edge of the crevasse.

  “I know.”

  “I just want to stand in one of those rooms, to feel the scale of it. They look so small from here.”

  “Anasazi people were smaller than us,” said Henry, giving a perfect imitation of Earl. “Earl told me. He said they were about five feet tall.”

  “Ah.”

  “You could take a degree in anthropology. If you were good you might convince them to let you in for research.”

  “I think it would be worth it,” said Rue.

  Henry took her hand as they walked back to the car.

  They drove on to Mummy Cave Overlook, where the ruined village filled a huge alcove in the rock. A very well preserved person had been found there, hence the name. The guidebook didn’t say if it was a man or a woman, nor was it clear if it was the result of an open-air burial, or if someone had stayed on alone in the village when everyone else had gone and finally lain down and died.

  At Massacre Overlook they weren’t sure they were looking at the right cave; it looked so small and so inaccessible. The sign said Navajo women and children had retreated to this ledge to hide from Spanish soldiers invading the canyon. They had been attacked then from above by a massive force on the cliff where Henry and Rue were standing, boldly blasting away at the cornered people. It was also called The Place Where Two Died because of a Navajo woman who had climbed from the ledge to the mesa, under fire, and killed a Spanish soldier by throwing herself from the cliff and taking him with her.

  They stopped at the Visitor’s Center at the head of the canyons, where artifacts from the ruins were displayed in glass cases. In the same room, a continuous video played, telling about Navajo life, past and present. The only people here besides themselves were some German tourists, a white-haired couple who were dressed as if for tennis. They moved around with the spritely energy of young athletes, and watching them made Rue and Henry feel crippled.

  Henry and Rue moved from case to case, looking at the displays of Anasazi detritus: seed pods and pottery shards and beautiful baskets and cotton bolls and turkey bones and three different kinds of sandals. They read the information cards slowly, feeling so physically impaired that they mistrusted that their brains still worked. They didn’t want to miss anything, and there was the distraction of the video soundtrack blaring away in English and Navajo.

  “The men wore their hair long, but the women cropped theirs short,” Rue announced. “Then they spun the hair along with other fibers and used the yarn to weave or braid with. Do you suppose that was a fashion statement? Or political?” Rue asked Henry. “One sex cutting the hair short? Like women’s dresses, cut off at the knee. Don’t you look at pictures of Hillary Clinton or Janet Reno, these national leaders with giant brains, with their bare legs sticking out of the bottom of their clothes, and wonder what they are thinking of?”

  Henry laughed, so that the spritely Germans turned to look at him.

  “Well I mean it. Can you imagine Richard Nixon greeting Khrushchev with his legs sticking out of his trousers? What is that?”

  Henry smiled happily and touched her shoulder. She knew he was saying she delighted him. It had been quite a while since she felt she delighted him.

  They ate lunch at a Burger King in Chinle.

  “It might be a Samson and Delilah thing, the women cropping their hair,” said Henry.

  “I doubt it. With Navajo and Hopi, the women own the property and the men move from the house of the mother to the house of the wife.”

  “What makes us think their social structure was the same?”

  “The kivas.”

  Henry helped himself to Rue’s french fries. “Don’t forget eighteenth-century Europe,” said Henry. “Look at Louis XIV. All the men wore wigs and breeches that stopped at the knee. To show off their calves.” He pulled up his pant leg a little and showed her his calf.

  “That’s true,” said Rue, happily. “What does it mean?” And inwardly she thought, I need you, Henry. I miss my husband, and I need my friend. Please let this mood last.

  But it didn’t. After lunch, they started north to Monument Valley. But in the car they had the same problem with the map as they had at first, and Georgia was with them again. To avoid talk, they tried to listen to the radio. The rental car got poor reception and only very local stations; they looked for a National Public Radio station and found hard rock. Even turned low, the screech of heavy metal was like a gun going off in the car, reminding them both of the tape Georgia had sent, which was the last message they had from her, if you didn’t count the broken clock. They turned the radio of
f.

  Rue began to think about school. She couldn’t go on much longer in a limbo between death and life. She had stopped floating. As scrub and sage and buttes rolled by outside, she began to think about Mike, and to worry about leaving him with things at such a flashpoint. In two days, she’d be back. She was hoping against hope that it would be a comfort to be at work. If she could be buoyed up by playing with three-year-olds, by seeing the new chicks born in the incubator in the kindergarten, by seeing a tiny eighth-grade girl in high heels doing Ethel Merman in Call Me Madam for the spring musical, she would be saved. And maybe if she were saved she could stay steady and in place long enough for Henry to come back to her.

  She looked at Henry and saw he was a million miles away. She’d seen that look so often in the last few weeks. But feeling her looking at him, he turned to her and met her eyes for a long few seconds. She felt he was studying her as if she were a rock he’d run over in the road. He’d stopped to get a better look because he’d never seen this object before.

  He turned away again and said, “I have to tell you something.” The tone was not casual; he did not mean he had to tell her he’d never liked Brussels sprouts. He wanted to tell her something that was going to make her sick. His eyes were fixed on the preposterous red buttes ahead of them. She looked at his profile and suddenly knew exactly what it was that was between them like a third passenger in the car, and it had nothing to do with Georgia.

  “I need to tell you,” he said.

  “I need you not to,” she answered.

  It seemed to her he stepped on the gas, and she thought, Oh, this will be solved in a few seconds. We’re going to flip and go up in flames together in a place with no name in northern Arizona. She hoped they would.