The Darkness Rolling

by Win Blevins

  I looked at my mother. Simply looked at her.

  “No questions,” she repeated, “and don’t think I’m going to let you out of my sight for one minute. Not yet, anyway.”

  She took my hand and led me through the bullpen—the trading post, the first big room of our house—then through our living room and into the kitchen. She lifted the lid off a bubbling iron pot. The steam swamped our faces. The gravy aroma was thick, rich, better than any restaurant in San Diego. It was part of me. I’ve only had one kitchen my whole life, so maybe they’re all like that. It’s the center, and everything good comes out from there.

  “I’ve been cooking two solid days for you,” she went on in Navajo. “Ha-nii-kai.” A stew of lamb marrow and white corn, my favorite.

  She led me to a window. The tone of her joy fell a few floors down an elevator. “You saw how things are outside?”

  I had. Stock pens collapsing, barn doors hanging by lone rusty hinges, their sky-peaked roofs sagging, corrals barely strong enough for the horses. Plenty more of the same everywhere I looked. For sure, Mom had the next month all planned out for me, and who could blame her, but … Sorry, Mom, I’ve got other plans.

  “Are you ready to see him?” She took me by both hands, and her face turned grave.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “No, you’re not. But it’s time.”

  Mom led me back into the living room of our home, past the eight-foot sofa that was Grandpa’s prize, and to the door of the rug room.

  “He’s waiting for you,” she said, and urged me forward. Clearly, Grandpa wanted me to see the circumstances of his new life in this special place, the center of the art that he loved most. Large, beautiful Navajo rugs of every design, each priced to keep it from selling, or at least to fetch enough to let him buy two that he liked even more. One step through a passageway … I faced the man who was my grandfather and father in one, whose life had been changed unalterably while I was a thousand miles away.

  In the middle of the room, he raised himself tall in his wheelchair, and parked on an eye-dazzler rug made by a great Navajo weaver. He had known, cultivated, and loved her as an artist and like a daughter. He was smiling. I suppose you could say, smiling broadly. The left side of his mouth rose into a kind of grin, and the right drooped. That entire side of his face drooped. His enormous beard actually lifted a little on the left. The overall effect was surreal. Heartbreaking. My big strong grandfather. Right then I hated the slap of time.

  Mom had written me about it. The stroke made the right side of his body nearly useless. Rehabilitation had helped, but he was still in the wheelchair and could speak only mangled words. True, he was improving daily, Mom said, and he was only sixty-four years old, so hope lurked around the corner. But my grandfather would never again be the man I had known all my life—my hero, the legendary king-size Jew of the Desert, Trader Supreme.

  She was right. No way to be ready for this. None. My trembling knees betrayed me.

  And yet. His presence throbbed with energy. I understood that he really was smiling, and he beckoned me to him with his left arm. I got down on my knees and leaned into his one-armed embrace. It was fierce. His laugh was a little odd, but I could tell he was trying for big and hearty. Grandpa’s spirit was still inside there, rough and rollicking as ever.

  He held me at one arm’s length and embarked on a demonstration of how cleverly the wheelchair worked. On the left side it had two big wheels instead of one. When he pushed one wheel, he pivoted to the right, the other, to the left. With a shove on both wheels at once he could make the chair roll forward or backward, fast.

  With his left hand he tapped his right bicep. I squeezed it lightly, and it felt like cooked noodles. Then he slowly made his right index finger point to his left bicep. That arm felt like the thick root of a tree.

  He grinned—I was coming to know it as a grin. He wheeled off at a scary speed through the bullpen and the living room, past the kitchen, where Mom was cooking fry bread, and to the door of his bedroom.

  The legs of the bed, once high, had been cut down about a foot. He turned his dead side to the mattress, pushed with his left leg and left arm, and levered himself onto the bed.

  He held up a finger to say a demonstration was coming. He rolled across the bed, got the position he wanted, and flipped his bottom squarely onto the chamber pot.

  What a relief that he had his pants on.

  Up popped the finger again. He rolled onto the bed and across, and then took a small blackboard from a pouch tied to the black metal arm of his chair. He chalked with his left hand, though he was right-handed, WORK ARM + LEG. He slipped the blackboard into the pouch again.

  Then he hoisted himself one-handed and one-legged into a new-fangled walker at the end of the bed. He started hobbling. A twig the thickness of my thumb would have supported his huge body as well as that right leg did.

  He hobbled jerkily back to the rug room and to its right wall. He showed me the cover of the record he intended to play now. He flipped a switch, put the 78 on the spindle of the turntable, and placed the needle arm on the record, all one-handed. In the white noise that preceded the music, he turned back to the middle of his beloved eye-dazzler rug.

  From the speakers came the piece I knew he loved best of all music, the fourth movement, Adagietto (he insisted on teaching me such terms, but I was never real clear about what they meant), of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. Not my kind of music—I go for swing—but definitely his. This piece was an elegy, and now it swept me high on emotion about the transformation from the giant of a man to this.… It was not what he intended, I knew, but I felt like a culvert in a gully washer of grief.

  After a few moments he lifted the needle. He mouthed distinctly, “Talk Mom,” and pointed toward the kitchen.

  He started his recording again, lowered himself by the rungs of his walker to the center of the rug, pulled his legs halfway to a cross-legged position, and molded his face into deep absorption.

  Understanding that he wanted to be alone with Mahler and his feelings, I padded away.

  I wandered through the living room and slid back through my eighteen years here. Sepia photographs of Grandpa everywhere, a lot of them with my grandmother. Others of him working, butchering a sheep for a ceremony, fleecing off wool, building a sandstone wall. The photo I loved most was Grandpa mounted on his black stallion, both man and horse of mythic proportions. Eighteen hands for the stallion, and Mose Goldman matched his mount at six feet eight inches, a rare height for anyone, but especially a Jewish man—that’s what he told me, and I believed him. The picture was shot when Mr. John made Stagecoach here.

  Duke Wayne and my grandfather had gotten to be friends during that movie. Gone hunting and shooting together with some of Grandpa’s well-kept guns. Caught fish out on the San Juan River, scraggly things that looked prehistoric, but John Wayne loved this land, even bought some property around here.

  When the shoot was over, Duke had gotten one of the wardrobe guys to take an army campaign hat and dye it black for Grandpa, so it looked kind of like the hat Hasidic Jews wear. A photo was taken, and there were laughs all around. It was half-heroic and half-comic, and underneath it was the label DON QUIXOTE. It was the way Grandpa came at life, a mix that tickled me and touched my heart.

  Sometimes I’ve hoped the oddity that is me, Yazzie Goldman, could grow to be half-heroic and half-comic. I still hope so. Whatever I was, or will become, my grandpa, Mose Goldman, made me. Not one inch of me existed that did not love my grandfather. Now his body lurched and was bent—I was coming to peace with that change. He was still, and ever, my hero.

  * * *

  Zopilote circled wide around the trading post, approached it from the west, hobbled his pony beyond a rise, and found a good hiding place behind some rocks above the well. In the last of the light he let his eyes feed on the familiar building—he had lived there for nearly a year—and the hot feeling boiled up in the buzzard man again. Volcanic hatred.

 
He knew that in the darkness—my true home, the Darkness Rolling—he would not be seen. From here he had an end view of the post, including the front and back entrances. He could tell by the over-bright light that Mose had wired the post for electricity. Lantern light would glow mellow. If the buzzard man slipped close, he’d be able to see into most of the windows, where the drapes were only half drawn.

  Yisté’! Look there! Was that really her? Yes, the hints of silver in her hair did not fool him. She watered a potted plant in the window, inspected her work, added a little more water, and disappeared. A moment later she walked out the back of the trading post and followed a path to the outhouse. He would know her walk anywhere—he had once been entranced by it. She disappeared and reappeared. On her way back she stooped to pick something up, studied it, and put it in her apron pocket. He got a good look at her face. In essence, unchanged after twenty-five years. Beautiful. And unchanged inside. Treacherous.

  She slipped through the back door.

  The ridiculous trial—his memory held it in the brightness of a thousand suns. His own wife and her father, the trader, testified against him. Zopilote never doubted what the verdict would be. His stomach juices were runaway horses of anger.

  Of course, he was not surprised that she was carrying his child. She had caught the baby from his breath in the first month they had spent together.

  White people were funny. They thought you made a baby by sticking your cock into a woman. Stupid idea. Babies were conceived in the exchange of breath, and of spirit, when a man and woman came together.

  He remembered that morning, all those years ago, right at sunrise. She took him by the shoulders, looked into his eyes, and told him that they had created a new human being last night. Two moons later she told him again. Yes, the child that swelled her belly was his.

  And now that infant was grown into this, this …

  Even at the moment she told him, he had understood that her words were intended to tether him, to keep him at home. But he was a man and would do as he wanted, and what he wanted was to ride broncs, drink, gamble, drink, gamble, and then drink and ride some more. Why not? People deserve the kind of life they want.

  * * *

  I picked Grandpa’s ancient edition of Don Quixote, printed in Spanish, off a shelf and sat down on the big leather sofa intending to browse through it. But my thoughts took me wandering.

  I was pretty sure I was the only person on the rez, right then, reading Cervantes. I was odd all right, and it didn’t come from being the grandson of a Jew, the son of a Navajo-Jewish woman, and being brought up in a trading post. Not really. It came from what my grandfather taught me. Make your own rules. Be fair. Be aware. Be bold. Take care of family. Learn. Learn more again. Love adventure. Sometimes, live on the edge.

  Grandpa’s ancestors had been driven out of Spain to Mexico, fleeing persecution, and then out of Mexico City to a remote province of New Mexico, living among Catholics, pretending to be Catholic, but in secret practicing Judaism. They learned that when you run from tyrannical authority, you can take only one thing with you—what you know. So he hammered education into me.

  I grew up in a sea of Navajo language, but he taught me English, Spanish, and enough Hebrew that I could have been bar mitzvahed. He had less patience with formal religion than I did, and he was not an observant Jew. But he saw the Torah as a book of wisdom, and I would have bet he still read it, one-handed.

  Cervantes rustled his pages at me.

  I didn’t hear her come in, so quiet as a deer she moved. She sat on the arm of the sofa, patted my arm.

  “It’s right to have you home. The third person here has been named Empty.”

  She looked at the book I was reading. “It’s not just me who’s missed you. Grandpa, you’re his twin, his son, his grandson—all those things.”

  “He turned me into a big reader.”

  “He did that for both of us,” my mother said. “You know the rhythm of life. It swings from blasts of hard work to bundles of blank time, time filled best by reading and stories.”

  I looked at my mother, my mother the woman. When I left she was simply my mom. Now I could see her as a beautiful woman, the aging and wise person with infinite patience but who sometimes tore up the world like lightning. Big brains. Had she been lonely? It had never occurred to me that she was a real person with desires and hopes that had nothing to do with me. Selfish, childish, but true.

  “Have you been okay? You wear yourself so fiercely, sometimes I forget, everyone around here forgets, that you’re not Superwoman.”

  “Life is good, Yazzie. I have my relatives, my ancestors, their spirits. All of that keeps me warm.”

  Sure … I thought. And then she crept right inside my mind.

  “Okay, a good man would have been nice, but that’s not in the cards for everyone,” she said. “Are you happy to be home, Yazzie? Some part of you feels half gone.”

  I smiled at her. “Mothers are terrible things,” I said, and could not believe I’d said it. I expected her to cave. Her with no mother, and me with a big mouth.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” she said. “Believe me, I have had enough aunts to understand about mothers, and I have been mother enough for ten kids to you. Let’s forgive each other.”

  “For what?”

  “Needing each other too much. Not always being honest.”

  And pretty soon I was going to tell her that I’d be gone in the morning. This was not going well for my insides, and it was going to get worse when I laid it all out on the table.

  “And think of your grandfather,” she said. “You idolize him, but he hasn’t always been easy—no one knows that better than me. During winters by the woodstove or in blazing-hot summers, we had four strict hours of reading, writing, and arithmetic. Sometimes,” she said, “it seemed like running this place was an interruption. Like our customers were a nuisance. It’s a miracle we’ve had one dime to rub against the other.”

  I had enjoyed learning time, and it’s true, sometimes I thought the customers were a bother, too. Reading by kerosene lamps, we rampaged through Homer to Shakespeare, from Dickens to Mark Twain. A herd of poets galloped with us, his favorite, Walt Whitman.

  She put her head back and laughed.

  “What?” I said.

  “You think that you’re an oddball? Think about how my side of the family sees us.”

  I didn’t want to think about it. I knew how the whole thing worked, and it still made my head hurt. So many relations, everyone connected.

  “They think we’re pathetic,” she said. “Some of them envy us the trading post, although I can tell you that not one of them would want to run it.”

  “I think you’re proud of yourself.”

  “About running the trading post? Maybe. But that is a business, and money comes and goes. What I do have is blood relations galore, and relations matter. Gatherings matter. Counting aunts and uncles as parents, and counting nieces and nephews as kids, I have enough family to make a herd. I wrap them around me like a blanket. You and your grandfather, you never warmed to doing that.”

  She was right, but I felt defensive. “Grandpa loves his family in Santa Fe.”

  “Of course he does. He’s always glad to welcome them and just as happy to see them head home.”

  She was right.

  “That wasn’t fair,” she said. “He does love them very much. They sit with him in the center of culture, of the music and books that he loves. And you,” she said, “fall in the middle of our two tribes.”

  “Not accepted by either,” I said, “and accepted by both. Sometimes—”

  “Stand up.”

  “What?”

  “Right now,” she said, “stand up.”

  I did.

  “Ask me what will bring your two hearts together. Let me help you.”

  “Who is my father? What I carry of him is that question.… He died before I was born, I know that. You and Grandpa never utter one word about him. I do
n’t even know his name.”

  She stood up in front of me and put both hands on my chest.

  “You are several tribes, and there is no split. If you were being introduced to a Navajo family you didn’t know—believe it or not, that might happen one day—then you will say who you are. Tell me. Say it.”

  I felt ridiculous, but I said it. Long time since I did that, in the Navajo way of introductions. “My Grandfather is born to Jew and born for Jew, no Navajo. My mother is born to the Bitter Water people and born for Jew. I am the same, my mother’s clan and my grandfather’s.” Here I got stuck, but just a little. “I do not use my father, because I don’t know his name or his clan. And, in our way, the father is the man who stays to raise the child. So my clan is my grandfather’s.”

  She looked up at me. “And that is everything you need to know.”

  My father stayed where he had always been with my mother. Don’t know, don’t care. “Your son, Yazzie Goldman,” I said to her, “born to the Bitter Water people, born for Jew.”

  Her eyes smiled and her back was straight. “You’ve got to get used to being who you are, Yazzie. It’s time.”

  And then there was something. A noise, a feeling? Something.

  “What is that?” I said.

  “What?”

  “That sound outside the window. A rustling.”

  She sat still and straight, shook her head. “Nothing. You’ve been living around so much noise that country silence sounds like a roar.”

  She stood and walked into the kitchen, the heart of our home, to finish cooking dinner for the family. I moved the curtain to the side, looking and listening. Probably just a passing wind tossing the squawberry branches. I closed the curtains, sat back down, and buried myself in Cervantes.

  * * *

  Twenty-five years ago, when Zopilote came back from that last long ride on the whiskey—for three moons he had been gone—he found his boots and a worn-out saddle on the front porch. That was the time-polished way for a Navajo woman to say, “You’re no longer my husband. Take your belongings, get going, and don’t come back.”