by Kurt Caswell
I readied myself and went to school.
Deena Bell greeted me in the front office. She was a tall, graceful Navajo woman with light-colored skin and a round face. She paid a great deal of attention to making herself up, the colors worked into her cheeks and across her eyes, her nails long and manicured, her hair black as jet and sprayed up into a tent on top of her head. Her eyes were dark brown, maybe black, and warm and inviting. She was the most beautiful Navajo woman I had met. She sat eternally behind the front desk. I rarely saw her standing or walking, just there behind the desk, a bright face to greet me. Later I came to know her outside of school, and to know Kestrel, her son, and Frank, her husband.
“Good morning!” she said. “How are the kids treating you? I sure hope they’re not giving you any trouble.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I think I’m doing all right.”
“Please ask if you need anything,” Deena said. “The first couple weeks are always the hardest for new teachers. We’ll make sure you get what you need. Right, girls?”
“We sure will,” said Arlene, who sat at the desk next to Deena. Betsy, who was busy digging in a file drawer, nodded her head.
“Please ask us,” Deena said, and she winked at me.
“May I use your phone again?” I asked.
“Of course you can,” Deena said.
“I need to try Navajo Communications again about getting my phone hooked up,” I explained. “I can’t seem to get an answer out of them. They just tell me to call back later.”
She paused and looked at me. “Hmmm,” she said. “Well, if they say that again, you should try going down there. You’ll never get anything out of a Navajo over the telephone. You have to go talk with them face to face.”
“All right,” I said. “I’ll go down there.”
“Go soon,” she said. “Do it real soon.”
“All right.”
I dialed the number. The receptionist at Navajo Communications told me to be patient, to wait, just for awhile, she said. The company planned to rebuild the entire system up to Borrego Pass, and then everyone living there would have a telephone in their home.
“That’s great news!” I said. “How long will it take?”
“Well, I’m not sure,” the receptionist said. “Not long, anyway. If you can just wait for awhile . . .”
“I can do that,” I said. “Should I call back in a couple weeks?”
“Oh no, don’t worry about that. It’ll all be finished up soon,” she assured me. “We’ll take care of it. Thank you very much for calling. You have a nice day.”
“I will. Thank you.” I hung up the phone. “Deena! Really good news,” I said, and then I told her all about it.
“Is it?” she said, singing the words out into a question. She glanced at Arlene. Then her eyes refocused on me like she had remembered something. “Well, yeah. That is good news. But how long do you plan on staying here? They’ve been saying that for the past five years.”
My heart sank. “What?”
“Yeah,” Deena said. “At least five years.”
“Good morning, Mr. Caswell,” said Louise, making her way through the door. She wore a big, loose dress, and she walked with a limp, a sort of jerking lean to one side. Her face was wrinkled and groggy, sun-worn, and her short white hair went in every direction. “Have you had your breakfast yet this morning? You can have breakfast with the kids if you want.”
“Yeah, I know. I usually eat before, though.”
“Not bad food,” she said, a bit out of breath. “And the kids like you to have breakfast with them if you can.”
I nodded. Then I said, “Thank you for your help, Deena.”
I needed to let the telephone thing go for now. The workday was about to begin, and I would have plenty of time to be miserable about it later.
“You ready for the day?” Louise asked me, but she didn’t wait for an answer. “Deena, what about that parent meeting today? Are they coming in or not?”
Then she turned back to me. “I’ve hardly gotten around today,” she apologized. “But I just wanted to make sure everything is going okay for you. Do you need anything or can I help you somehow?” Then she looked back at Deena. “So what’s the story?”
“I think I’m okay,” I said. “Thank you.”
“We told him the same thing,” Deena said. “Anything he needs, he should come to us.”
“Good girls,” Louise said.
“And they’re coming in, for sure,” Deena said. “As sure as that can be.”
“Oh, god,” Louise said. “I was hoping they’d cancel. I can hardly face it today.”
“Well,” Deena said. “You know them. You probably won’t have to.”
I wondered about Louise, a big white woman in her later years, living alone in the desert, teaching Navajo kids. How long had she been here? Why was she here? She didn’t seem to fit in on the reservation, but then maybe no white person did. Maybe no Navajo person did either. Navajo people belong to this landscape, to be sure—the reservation covers roughly that same country they lived in before the U.S. government took it by force—but I mean the reservation, the genesis of it, which was more akin to a prison than a sanctuary. Maybe the question came to me because during the brief time I had so far spent with Louise, I doubted that she was happy. I saw longing in her eyes, and the sense of having given up on something. Had she come here looking for adventure, like me, and then stayed so long that life off the rez had become foreign and disagreeable to her? Or was she desperate to get out but found that her résumé had become unsuitable to schools elsewhere? From the viewpoint of many mainstream schools in the United States, public and private, the line between teaching in foreign lands for experience and adventure (and I must include American Indian reservations as foreign lands), and teaching in foreign lands because something about you isn’t quite right or isn’t quite mainstream, or perhaps because you sabotaged your professional reputation with some unsavory activity, might be drawn at about five years of teaching and about twenty-eight years old, maybe thirty. After that, school administrators seem to regard such experience as questionable. Suspect. A little weird. Did Louise wake up one morning and find she was stuck on the rez? Or did she live here by choice?
Still, Louise knew her business at the school, and she obviously cared about these kids. And that, as any teacher will affirm, is all that matters.
Lauren came into the office and greeted us all. She asked me, “How have you been? You need anything? Is everything going okay? Do you need anything?”
“That’s what we said,” Deena said.
“I’m here,” I said. “Just settling in. Everything’s all right.”
“You’re probably overwhelmed with all this new stuff. It’ll calm down soon. You can ask me for anything anytime,” she said.
“Thank you. I will.”
Except for the principal and the school board, Borrego Pass School was run by women. The majority of the teachers were women, and women ran the kitchen, the purchasing office, and the payroll and drove half of the buses. And I would discover that the girls far out-performed the boys in the classroom. This corresponded, to my mind, with the fact that traditionally the Navajo social structure is matriarchal. It’s the wife who controls the family home, or hogan, and the land, which is often passed down from her family. She is said to “own” the children. They become part of her clan, rather than her husband’s, so that descendants are traced through the woman’s line. She owns her jewelry. She owns the sheep from which she spins her wool, as well as the income from the sale of the blankets and rugs she weaves. In the old days, a Navajo wife was far more liberated than women of white America. Later, due to the influence of white people and white inheritance laws, matriarchal practices atrophied until it wasn’t so uncommon for a Navajo woman to live on her husband’s land, if he had any. Still, the matriarchal structure runs as an undercurrent through Navajo life and seemed to influence everything that happened at Borrego. I felt at all
times in the care of women.
“Lauren,” I said. “I do have one question. What about a textbook?”
So far I had gotten by without a book, but I was running out of ideas. I didn’t need a text to teach writing, but it was the reading I needed most, some kind of story and essay collection.
“Right,” Lauren said. “I’ve been thinking about that. I want to order individual books for my classes, so I won’t be using my textbooks. Would you like to look at them?”
“Look at them? I’ll take them,” I said. “Whatever they are.”
“But there is also the option of me keeping the textbooks and you using whole works,” she said.
“No, no. You go ahead with your plans. I’ll take the texts.”
“Oh, good,” she said. “Good then. I prefer to teach whole works anyway.”
“When can I pick up the books? In a week or so?”
“Anytime. Right now. Today,” Lauren said.
“That would be so great. Can I send my class over to pick them up?” I asked.
“That would work great.”
After breakfast, the sixth-grade class formed an orderly line behind me at the cafeteria door. I had been sitting with the same group of sixth-grade boys from that first morning, listening to them talk and joke. This was a critical part of the school day: most of the students at Borrego didn’t get breakfast at home because there wasn’t any, and some of them came to school just to eat breakfast. The school certainly couldn’t expect the students to be attentive in class when they were hungry.
When the line quieted down a little, and all the kids looked at me ready to go, I led them down the hall to my classroom, the boys’ hair shining and wet from the bathroom sink and swept back with the liquid soap they put in there to look like Chicano gangbangers in Albuquerque. But they weren’t Chicano gangbangers. They were Navajo boys, and they spent a lot of time outside in the sun and they were always talking about their dogs and killing rabbits to feed them, and how they’d hunt half the morning for their horse wandering somewhere out there in the desert, and when they found it, they’d have to catch it, and then they’d leap on it with no saddle and no bridle and ride and ride and ride.
“I heard you come from China!” Shane Yazzie said as we stepped into the classroom.
“You remember the rule,” I said. “You have to raise your hand if you want to say something.”
Shane sat down. His hand shot up.
“Yes, Shane?”
“I heard you came from China!”
“No. Not China. I’m from Oregon. But I worked in Japan for a few years.”
“That means you’re Chinese?” Shane said.
“No, Japanese,” said Kyle Bigfoot.
“You have to raise your hand,” I said.
Kyle raised his hand as high as he could, and so did Shane.
“Kyle?” I said. “Yes?”
“That means you’re Chinese!” Shane said, then he clapped his hand over his mouth to stop himself.
“No, it’s mines,” Kyle said. “I’m next. I raised my hand.”
I never knew if this was a carryover from the Navajo language, or just a glitch in understanding English, but most of these kids added an s to pluralize words that didn’t need it. “Mines” was one example. And “reals” was another. “For reals, Mr. Caswell?” they would say. And when they said goodbye it came out, “See you laters, Mr. Caswell.” One of Mary’s students over in Ganado told her that his family was headed out to cut firewood that weekend. He said, “We’re goin’ to the woods to get some woods.”
Shane still held his hand over his mouth and puffed out his cheeks like he might explode.
“Yes, Kyle, you raised your hand,” I said.
“You’re Japanese,” Kyle said. “From Japan, way over there.”
“No. I’m still American. I just worked in Japan.”
“Hey, you gotta Japan-girl?” asked John George.
“Your hand,” I said.
“Oh, yeah,” John George said. He put his hand up and said, “You gotta Japan-girl?”
“We have to get to work,” I said. “First I need five of you to go over to Mrs. Sittnick’s room—”
Every hand went up.
“—to get our textbooks,” I said.
All the hands went down.
“Naw. We don’t need no books,” said Shane. “Let’s just go outside and play around.”
“Yeah,” said John George. “Let’s just go out there and do nothin’.”
“We have to study,” I said. “We have to practice reading and writing.”
“No way,” Shane said. “Let’s just do nothing.”
Leanne Yazzie raised her hand. “I’ll go do it,” she said. “And Valeria and Gay will come with me.”
“Is that right?” I asked.
Valeria and Gay nodded their heads.
“And pick me, Mr. Caswell,” John George said. “I can do it.”
“Okay,” I said. “And I need one more volunteer.”
The room went still. No one said anything.
“Just one more volunteer,” I said. “Then we’ll have this job done.”
Still no one moved.
Then Leanne slowly raised her hand. She looked around the room. “What’s a vol-lun-teer?” she asked, almost whispering.
“I mean one more person to get books,” I said.
Six hands went up.
“Okay, Kyle,” I said. “Why don’t you go.”
“Yeah!” he said.
I put everyone else to work making room on the shelves for the books. Lauren advised that I assign each student a textbook but that they leave the books in the classroom rather than taking them home. We opened up a space, and the five volunteers began filling the shelves with books, big, heavy hardback books, each with a softcover workbook. They brought in the books for the seventh and eighth grades too.
“Here you go, Mr. Caswell,” Valeria said. “We’re almost done now.”
She hefted her pile up on the shelf, and I noticed blood leaking out of her left ear.
“Valeria,” I said. “Your ear is bleeding.” I could see the circle around the ear on the side of her face where something had struck her.
She put her hand there. “No it’s not,” she said, disgusted with me.
“Yes it is,” I said. “Did you fall or something?”
“No.”
“Do you need to see the nurse?”
“No,” she said.
“Let me see it,” I said.
She pulled away. “No,” she said. “Just mind your own beeswax.”
I had obviously invaded her space, but it seemed necessary. “May I just take a look?” I said. “You might need to see the nurse.”
“She got hit,” John George said.
“Shut up, stupit,” Valeria said.
“I’m not gonna touch it. Just let me take a look,” I said.
“Yeah,” John George said. “He hit you right there on your ear.”
“No,” said Valeria, jerking back again. She made a fist and waved it at John. “I’ll hit you.”
“No,” John George said, “ ’Cause you’re crazy and too slow!”
Valeria went after him then, moving fast around the desks, and John George leaped away as she went for him, crashing back into a chair that tipped and clattered on the floor, both moving faster now, around the edge of the classroom along the windows. John passed the blackboard and ran out the door. Valeria followed, and I heard them running down the hallway at top speed.
“Jesus,” I muttered.
“Jesus!” Shane said.
“She’s gonna beat him up,” Kyle said. “And she hits real hard, too.”
I looked down the hall, but they were both gone. I saw Lauren stepping out of her classroom. I waved to her. She waved back and then looked down the hallway toward the front office. We heard the double doors that led outside onto the playground shut.
“It’s recess time, Mr. Caswell,” said Kyle. “Let’s g
o! Hurry.”
“Yeah,” said Shane. “ ’Cause maybe they’re gonna fight.”
“No fights,” I said. “Don’t let them fight.”
Shane grinned. “I like to watch a fight.”
“All right, you can go now,” I said. “Don’t run in the hallway.”
They all ran down the hallway as fast as they could and out the front doors into the sun.
I met Lauren outside watching over the playground.
“What was that all about?” she asked.
“Have you seen Valeria today?”
“Valeria Benally,” she said. It sounded like she already knew. “No, but I heard about it from Leanne.”
“About her ear?”
“Yeah,” Lauren said. And then Lauren told me the story.
Sometimes Navajo children have problems with their ears because they sit in the back of pickup trucks wherever they go, the winter and summer winds speeding across their bare ears. It often causes hearing loss. But that’s not what happened to Valeria. A bad uncle took drunken liberties with her younger sister. He raped her. Valeria might have been next, but she fought him and hit him and struggled to break free, when he clapped her on the side of her head with his hand. She ran to get her good uncle to help. The drunk uncle shot the good uncle in the chest with a pistol. Valeria escaped into the hills with her little sister and they lived out there for two days. They did not eat anything for two days. By the time Valeria’s grandmother returned from Window Rock, the bad uncle was in jail. He stole a car in Gallup, and the police chased him all the way to Albuquerque.
“What do we do?” I asked Lauren.