“It’s named for Spider Woman. She lived up there a long time ago. One day she lassoed two Navajo ladies with her web and pulled them up there and taught them how to weave rugs.”
The thought of standing on top of that rock, let alone trying to learn anything up there, made me shiver. “Is that the same Spider Grandmother who raised the twins?”
I expected Loyd to be impressed by my memory, but he just nodded. “That’s a Pueblo story and this is a Navajo story, but it’s the same Spider Woman. Everybody kind of agrees on the important stuff.”
I shaded my eyes and looked up the canyon. Its narrows gave window views into its wider places. Giant buttresses of rock extended from the canyon walls, like ships, complete with knobbly figureheads standing on their prows. Some of the figureheads had been stranded, eroded away from the mother rock, and stood alone as sculptured spires. Where the canyon grew narrower the rock buttresses alternated like baffles, so the river had to run a slalom course around them. So did we. The truck crunched over icy shoals and passed through crystal tunnels of icy cottonwood branches. We passed a round hogan with a shingled roof and a line of smoke rising from its chimney pipe. A horse wandered nearby, nosing among the frozen leaves.
Several times Loyd stopped to point out ancient pictures cut in the rock. They tended to be in clusters, as if seeking refuge from loneliness in that great mineral expanse. There were antelope, snakes, and ducks in a line like a carnival shooting gallery. And humans: oddly turtle-shaped, with their arms out and fingers splayed as if in surrender or utter surprise. The petroglyphs added in recent centuries showed more svelte, self-assured men riding horses. The march of human progress seemed mainly a matter of getting over that initial shock of being here.
Eventually we stopped in a protected alcove of rock, where no snow had fallen. The walls sloped inward over our heads, and long dark marks like rust stains ran parallel down the cliff face at crazy angles. When I looked straight up I lost my sense of gravity. The ground under my boots was dry red sand, soft and fine, weathered down from the stone. If the river rose to here, the mud would be red. Loyd held my shoulders and directed my eyes to the opposite wall, a third of the way up. Facing the morning sun was a village built into the cliff. It was like Kinishba, the same multistory apartments and unbelievably careful masonry. The walls were shaped to fit the curved hole in the cliff, and the building blocks were cut from the same red rock that served as their foundation. I thought of what Loyd had told me about Pueblo architecture, whose object was to build a structure the earth could embrace. This looked more than embraced. It reminded me of cliff-swallow nests, or mud-dauber nests, or crystal gardens sprung from their own matrix: the perfect constructions of nature.
“Prehistoric condos,” I said.
Loyd nodded. “Same people, but a lot older. They were here when Columbus’s folks were still rubbing two sticks together.”
“How in the world did they get up there?”
Loyd pointed out a crack that zigzagged up from the talus slope to the ledge where the village perched. In places the crevice wasn’t more than two inches deep. “They were pretty good rock climbers,” he said. Loyd’s forte was understatement.
There wasn’t a sound except for the occasional, echoing pop of a small falling rock. “What were they scared of?” I asked quietly.
“I don’t know. Maybe they weren’t scared. Maybe they liked the view.”
The doors were built so you’d have to step high to get out. Obviously, for the sake of the children. “Gives you the willies, doesn’t it? The thought of raising kids in a place where the front yard ends in a two-hundred-foot drop?”
“No worse than raising up kids where the frontyard ends in a freeway.”
“You’re right,” I said. “No worse than that. And quieter. Less carbon monoxide.”
“So you do think about that sometimes,” Loyd said.
“About what?”
“Being a mother.”
I glanced at him and considered several possible answers. “All the time,” and “never” seemed equally true. Sometimes I wanted to say, “You had your chance, Loyd, we had our baby and it’s dead.” But I didn’t. That was my past, not his.
“Sure, I think about it,” I said, needing to relieve the pressure in my chest. “I think about hotwiring a Porsche and driving to Mexico, too.”
He laughed. “Only one of the two is legal, I’m told.”
I wanted to try and climb up into the cliff village, but Loyd explained that we’d crack our skulls, plus you weren’t supposed to mess with the antiquities.
“I thought you broke all the rules,” I said, as we climbed back into the truck and headed farther up the canyon.
He looked surprised. “What rules have I broken?”
“Authorized Navajo personnel only, for starters. We’re not even supposed to be down here.”
“We’re authorized guests of Maxine Shorty of the Streams Come Together clan.”
“Does she live here?”
“Not now. Almost everybody drives their sheep out and spends the winter up top, but the farms are down here. Leander and I spent almost every summer here till we were thirteen.”
“You did? Doing what?”
“Working. I’ll show you.”
“Who’s Maxine Shorty?”
“My aunt. I’d like you to meet her but she’s down visiting at Window Rock for the holiday.”
Loyd was full of surprises. “I’ll never get your family straight. How’d you get a Navajo aunt? Are Navajos and Pueblos all one big tribe or something?”
Loyd laughed rather hysterically. It occurred to me that this redneck Apache former cockfighter must find me, at times, an outstanding bonehead. “The Pueblo people were always here,” he explained patiently. “They’re still building houses just like this—the Rio Grande Pueblos, Zuñi, Hopi Mesa. Not in the cliffs anymore, but otherwise just the same. They’re about the only Indians that haven’t been moved off their own place into somebody else’s.”
“And the Navajo?”
“Navajos and Apaches are a bunch that came down from Canada, not that long ago. A few hundred years, maybe. Looking for someplace warmer.”
“And this is now Navajo tribal land, because?”
“Because the U.S. Government officially gave it to them. Wasn’t that nice? Too bad they didn’t give them the Golden Gate Bridge, too.”
The truck crunched over frozen sand. “So the Pueblo are homebodies, and the Navajo and Apache are wanderers.”
“You could look at it that way, I guess.”
“What are you?”
“Pueblo.” There was no hesitation. “What are you?”
“I have no idea. My mother came from someplace in Illinois, and Doc Homer won’t own up to being from anywhere. I can’t remember half of what happened to me before I was fifteen. I guess I’m nothing. The nothing Tribe.”
“Homebody tribe or wanderer tribe?”
I laughed. “Emelina called me a ‘homewrecker’ one time. Or no, what did she say? A ‘home ignorer.’”
He didn’t respond to that.
“So how’d you get a Navajo aunt?” I asked again.
“The usual way. My mother’s brother married her. Pueblo men have to marry out of the clan, and sometimes they go off the pueblo. The land down here stays with the women. So my uncle came here.”
Maxine Shorty’s farm, which she inherited from her mother and would pass on to her daughters, was a triangle bordered by the river and the walls of a short side canyon. We parked by the line of cottonwoods near the river and walked over the icy stubble of a cornfield. A sad scarecrow stood guard. It occurred to me that the barrenness of a winter farm was deceptive; everything was there, it was still fertile, just as surely as trees held their identity in the shape and swell of their bare winter twigs.
“Has it changed much?”
I meant it as a joke, I saw nothing that could have changed, but Loyd looked around carefully. “Those little weedy cottonwood
s have grown up along the stream. And there’s a big boulder on that slope, you see the one with dark stripes? That used to be up there.” He pointed to a place in the canyon wall, visible only to himself, from which the boulder had fallen. Most men, I thought, aren’t this familiar with the furniture in their homes.
“So what did you do here?”
“Worked our butts off. Weeded, picked corn, grew beans and watermelons. And had to carry a lot of water in the bad years.”
“Were those peach trees here?” I asked. A weathered orchard occupied the steep upper section of land.
“They’re older than my aunt. The peach trees go way back. They were planting orchards down here three hundred years ago.”
“A canyon of fruit. Like Grace.”
He inspected the trees carefully, one at a time: the bases of the branches, the trunks, the ends of twigs. I didn’t know what he was looking for, and didn’t ask. It seemed like family business. On this land Loyd seemed like a family man.
“And did the people that lived up in the cliffs grow corn and beans too?”
“That’s right.”
“So how come this canyon’s stayed productive for a thousand and some-odd years, and we can’t even live in Grace for one century without screwing it up?”
It was mostly a rhetorical question but Loyd considered it for a long time as he led me along a path up the talus slope to the back of the box canyon.
“I know the answer to that,” he said finally. “But I can’t put it in words. I’ll have to show you. Not here. Later on.”
I felt sadly let down, though it was closer to an actual promise of revelation than I’d gotten in nine years of watching Carlo’s eyebrows. I could wait for “later on.”
At the top of the slope was another ancient dwelling, this one mainly just ruined walls. The floor plan was clear. It interested me that the doors all lined up, I suppose to admit light to the interior.
“I found a whole clay pot in here one time,” Loyd said. “It’s in my mother’s house.” He lowered his voice. “Don’t tell any Navajos, they’ll throw Mama in jail.”
“You brought it back to her at the end of one summer, right? As a present. And she still treasures it.”
He smiled a little shyly. The image of a ten-year-old Loyd brought the threat of tears to my eyes. I’d spent my life watching mother-child rituals from outside the window.
“So you played in here when you were little?”
“Oh, yeah. This used to be me and Leander’s fort.”
“Cowboys and Indians?”
He laughed. “Good Indians and bad Indians.”
“Which were you?”
“Nobody can be good all the time. Or bad all the time. We took turns.”
He led me over a couple of tumbledown walls to the base of the cliff, and knelt down. I looked where he pointed. Set carefully among an assortment of old petroglyphs were two modern ones: the outlined left hands of two small boys, just touching, perfectly matched.
We crossed the high desert from Chinle to Ship Rock, New Mexico, and on to the Jemez Mountains. Wind battered the windows and we warmed our hands at the heater vents and talked about everything under the sun. Loyd talked about his marriage to Cissie Ramon, which he said was noisy and short. Cissie was crazy about rooster fighting, men, and unusual colors of nail polish, like green. He’d thought she was exotic, but she was just wild; there was a difference. She ran out on him.
He was a good deal more interested in talking about working in his aunt’s pecan orchards, in Grace. This aunt was his mother’s sister, Sonia. She married a Pueblo man from her village but moved with him to Grace when Black Mountain drafted Native American men into the mines during World War II. Sonia and her husband planted fruit trees there, thinking the war would last at least twenty years, and when it didn’t they felt they ought to stay on in Grace anyway, for the sake of the orchards.
It was a different story from farming in Canyon de Chelly, Loyd said. Sonia had started out as a tenant picker, before buying her own pecan orchard, and she learned harvesting the modern way. Usually the harvest started in October and ran till Thanksgiving. To get the nuts off the trees, they used a machine called a tree shaker.
“I remember guys hitting the branches with sticks, when I was a kid,” I said.
“Nah, we were high-tech. After the tree shaker comes the harvester, which is this big thing with a vacuum-scooper that you drive along between the rows. It scoops up everything and blows the sticks and leaves out the back, and the pecans and rocks fall down into this cage at the bottom. More junk falls out the slots as it rolls around, and the hulls fall off, and the idea is you end up with mostly pecans. But really you end up with pecans and pecan-sized dirt clods and pecan-sized rocks.”
“So did you get to drive the big machines?”
“Nope. Mostly I got to pick rocks and dirt clods off the conveyor. I think that was the best job I ever had. The hardest, but the best, because I grew up on it. Stopped thinking about myself all the time and started thinking about something else, even if it was just damn pecans.”
I took it from Loyd’s use of the singular pronoun that Leander was dead by this time. Slowly I was patching together Loyd’s life, and it was not the poor little gypsy story I’d imagined. I suppose I’d wanted to see him as a fellow orphan. But everywhere he’d been, he’d been with family.
“How long will Grace last without the river?” I asked.
“Two or three years, maybe. The old orchards will go longer because their roots are deeper.” He glanced at me. “You know I have an orchard?”
“No. In Grace?”
“Yep. Not the pecans, those belong to my cousins, but Tía Sonia’s leaving me the peach orchard. The fruit trees were always my job, keeping the birds and squirrels off the fruit.”
“How do you do that?”
“Well, the main way is by killing them.”
I laughed.
“What’s funny?”
“I don’t know.” I stared out the windshield. In the distance, Ship Rock floated like a ghost vessel on the snowy plain. “So you now have a dying orchard to call your own. Your Aunt Sonia’s moved back to Santa Rosalia, right?”
“Right. But the orchard’s not mine till I have kids.”
“That doesn’t seem fair.”
“No, it makes sense. When you have a family, you need trees.” He paused, carefully, it seemed to me, and redirected the conversation. “What job did you grow up on?”
I thought this over. “Maybe I haven’t had it yet.”
He smiled. “You went to medical school, right? And almost finished. That can’t be too easy.”
“When it stopped being easy, I quit.”
“What were you doing in Tucson, then, before you came to Grace?”
“You don’t want to know. Cashier in a 7-Eleven.”
“Shoot. And I thought you were too good to go out with a locomotive engineer. What about before that?”
“You don’t want to know.”
“Yes, I do.”
“Well, I did medical research at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota.”
“Damn! Really?”
“Yep. I was living up there two years ago when I first found out Doc Homer was sick.”
“And before that?”
I rolled my head back and looked at the roof of the car. “You really don’t want to know.”
“You were President of the United States.”
“Guess again.”
“You hotwired Porsches.”
I laughed. “The biggest thing I ever stole was a frozen lobster, for my boyfriend’s birthday. I was working in frozen foods and I think I actually wanted to get fired. Doesn’t that sound stupid?”
“Yes, it sounds stupid. So that came before Mayo Clinic?”
“That, and a bunch of different odd little things. A few piddly research jobs in between. Believe me, I never put everything on the same résumé.”
“And what’s the one you never mention?
The one you’re trying not to tell me about.”
“For a few years in there I lived overseas.”
“No kidding. Did you fly? Shoot, I’d love to go someplace in an airplane.”
“Flying’s okay,” I said. In truth, flying terrified me. It’s the one thing I knew I had in common with my mother, who’d flat-out refused, there at the end. In my own life I handled it by means of steadfast denial. I’d flown over the Atlantic Ocean twice without even checking to see if there really was a flotation device under my seat; flotation seemed beside the point. Oh, I flew like a bird.
“So, okay, what were you doing overseas?”
I glanced at him. “I was my boyfriend Carlo’s girlfriend. On the island of Crete.”
He seemed amused. “What, you mean you cleaned house and made cookies?”
“Kind of. Sometimes I’d help out in the clinic. One time I set the broken leg of a sheep. But mostly I was a housewife.”
“So you’d, what, go shopping in a bikini?”
I laughed. “It really was not that kind of island. You know where it is, right? In between Greece and Egypt. The women wear black wool dresses and crucifixes the size of a hood ornament. Getting the picture?”
He nodded.
“The main baby present for a boy is a silver knife, which they present in this ceremony where the godparents list all the enemies of the family going back to around Adam and Eve.”
“You liked it that much, huh?”
I took my coat off. It was finally warming up. “Well, it was interesting. It was someplace to go. It was like going to another century, actually. But I felt like a complete outsider.” I closed my eyes, fighting an old ache.
“How do you mean?”
“I’m pretty good at languages but I never could get the hang of fitting in. Not anywhere, but especially not there.”
“Why do you think you don’t fit in? Give me an example.”
It was plain that I’d always been an oddity in Grace, so he must have meant how was I an oddity in Crete. “Well, my first day there I marched into the bakery and asked for a psoli. The word for a loaf of bread is psomi. A psoli is a penis.”
Animal Dreams Page 21