Crossroads

by Jonathan Franzen

  On Christmas morning, on the snow-dusted porch of their house, Russ found a small chest of white oak, the size of a child’s coffin. The wood was smoothly planed and fragrant, the brass fittings stippled with hand manufacture. Inside it was a note. For Russell on Christmas, I reckon you have enough tools to fill this, Love from your Opa.

  Russ, weeping, carried the chest inside. He wept again later in the morning, when his father instructed him to get an ax and chop it up for kindling.

  “No,” he said, “that’s a waste. Someone else can use it.”

  “You will do as I say,” his father said. “I want you to look into the fire and watch it burn.”

  “I don’t think that’s necessary,” his mother said mildly. “Let’s just put it away for now. My father may yet repent.”

  “He won’t,” his father said. “Nothing in this world is certain, but I know his mind better than you do. Russell will do as I say.”

  “No,” Russ said.

  “You will obey me. Go and get an ax.”

  Russ put on his overcoat, took the chest outside, as if he intended to obey, and carried it through the streets of Lesser Hebron. Because he loved his grandfather and love was the essence of the Gospel, he didn’t even feel defiant. He felt, instead, that his parents were somehow mistaken.

  The blacksmith shop was shuttered, chimney smoke rising from the low rooms in back. Russ was less afraid of his father’s wrath than of finding his grandfather with a harlot, but Clement was alone in his little kitchen, boiling coffee on the woodstove. He looked like a new man—closely shaved and freshly barbered, his fingernails clean. Russ explained what had happened.

  “I’ve made my peace with it,” Clement said. “I already lost your mother when she married, and that’s as it should be. No more than what the Scripture asks.”

  “She’s praying for you. She wants you to—repent.”

  “I don’t hold it against her. Your father, yes, but not her. She’s godlier than any of us. If Estelle were baptized again and married me, I don’t doubt that your mother would accept her. But I’ll be a sick old man soon enough. I don’t want Estelle feeling she has to take care of me. It’s blessing enough to have her now.”

  The verb to have, the very name Estelle, the carnality they evoked, made Russ queasy.

  “If God can’t forgive me,” Clement said, “so be it. But who’s to say if your father knows what God forgives? I’ve been to the Lutheran church, over to Dobbsville, with Estelle. Good people, plenty Christian—there are many ways to skin a cat. I can’t say as I’ve tried any of them, but I’ve skinned a raccoon, and the adage has it right. There are different ways of doing it.”

  Leaving the beautiful chest safe with Clement, Russ went home and confessed to his mother what he’d done. She kissed him and forgave him, but his father never really did, because Russ had made his choice. When he went to Arizona and discovered for himself the different ways a cat could be skinned, the only disclosive letters he wrote were to his grandfather.

  The alternative service camp was in the national forest outside Flagstaff, on the site of a former CCC camp. It was administered by the American Friends Service Committee, but a good third of the workers shared Russ’s faith. After he’d shoveled dirt for some months, painted picnic tables, planted trees, the camp director asked him if he could use a typewriter. Though still only twenty, Russ was among the older workers, and he’d had five semesters of college. The director, George Ginchy, set him up with a foot-tall Remington, its keys yellowed to the color of custard, in the antechamber of his office. Although Ginchy was a Quaker, from Pennsylvania, he was also a longtime college football coach and Boy Scout leader. His camp had a bugler who began the day with reveille and ended it with taps, a cook whose job title was quartermaster, and now, in Russ, an aide-de-camp. Ginchy liked everything about military life except the killing part.

  One morning in the spring of 1945, the sun rose on a dusty black relic of a truck parked outside headquarters. Inside it, upright and silent, since sometime in the night, had been sitting four Navajo men in black felt hats. They were elders from Tuba City and had come to petition the camp director. George Ginchy welcomed them, widened his eyes at Russ, and asked him to bring coffee. Taking a pot into the office, Russ found three of the Navajo men standing against a wall with their arms crossed, the fourth studying a framed topo map in the corner, all of them silent.

  Russ had never seen an Indian before, and he had so little worldly experience that he didn’t recognize the sensation in his heart as love at first sight. He thought the Navajos’ faces moved him because they were old. And yet, if he’d been asked to describe their leader, who wore a turquoise-clasped string tie beneath a fleece-collared coat, stiff with dirt, he might have used the word beautiful.

  Ginchy uncomfortably said, “How can I help you gentlemen?”

  One of them murmured in a strange tongue. The leader addressed Ginchy. “What are you doing here?”

  “We, ah—this is a service camp for men with a conscientious objection to war.”

  “Yes. What are you doing?”

  “Specifically? It’s a bit of a hodgepodge. We’re improving the national forest.”

  This seemed to amuse the Navajos. There were chuckles, an exchange of glances. The leader nodded at the pine trees outside and explained, “It’s a forest.”

  “Land of many uses,” Ginchy said. “I believe that is the Forest Service motto. You’ve got your logging, your hunting, your fishing, your watershed protection. We’re improving the basis for all that. My guess is, somebody knew the right people in Washington.”

  A silence fell. Russ offered a mug of coffee to the leader, who wore a wide silver ring on his thumb, and asked if he wanted sugar.

  “Yes. Five spoons.”

  When Russ returned from the antechamber, the leader was explaining to Ginchy what he wanted. The federal government, through its agents, had impoverished the Navajos by requiring severe reductions of their stock of cattle, sheep, and horses, and by unfairly siding with the Hopis in their land disputes. Now the country was fighting a war in which the Navajos sent their young men to fight, and conditions were bad on the reservation—fertile land eroding, the remaining stock fenced out of good pasture, too few able hands available for restoration work.

  “War is bad for everyone,” Ginchy agreed.

  “You are the federal government. You have strong young men who won’t fight. Why help a forest that doesn’t need helping?”

  “I’m sympathetic, but I’m not actually the federal government.”

  “Send us fifty men. You feed them, we’ll shelter them.”

  “Yeah, that’s … We have procedures here, roll calls and so forth. If I sent people to your reservation, they’d be off my reservation, if you take my meaning.”

  “Then you come, too. Move your camp. There isn’t any work to do here.”

  “I don’t have authority for that. If I asked for authority, the government would remember I’m here. I’d rather they not remember.”

  “They’ll forget again,” the leader said.

  Already, in his first minutes of acquaintance, because he instinctively loved them, Russ grasped that the Navajos weren’t lesser than white men but simply very different. In his later experience, they were unfailingly blunt about what they wanted. They didn’t say please, didn’t bow to convention or authority. Disqualifications self-evident to white men were meaningless to them. White men chalked up the frustrations of dealing with them to orneriness and stupidity, but Russ, that morning, saw nothing stupid in them. It hurt to think that they’d come all the way from Tuba City, a drive of several hours, and sat for further hours in a freezing truck, with an idea that made sense to them. It hurt to think of them returning empty-handed, in some unguessable state of mind—disappointment? Anger at the government? Embarrassment for having been naïve? Or just mute perplexity? Russ had been thirteen when his beloved farm dog, Skipper, fell sick with what his mother said was cancer. The dog�
�s pain and infirmity soon reached the point where she made Russ ask a neighbor to shoot him and bury him. For Russ the hardest part of saying good-bye had been that Skipper couldn’t understand what he was doing to him, or why. The Navajo elders were the opposite of dumb beasts, but this only made imagining their perplexity more painful.

  When the sugared coffee had been drunk, Ginchy took down the elders’ names and offered to send them a truckload of food and clothes. The leader, whose name was Charlie Durochie, was unmoved and didn’t thank him.

  “That was a strange one,” Ginchy said when they were gone.

  “They’re right, though,” Russ said. “The work here seems like make-work.”

  “That’s some other fellow’s decision. I have to tread carefully, you know. Roosevelt wanted the army in charge of these camps.”

  “But we’re supposed to be here serving, not building picnic tables.”

  “The service I perform is keeping men out of the war. If that means building picnic tables…”

  Russ asked him for permission to deliver the supplies to Tuba City.

  “They didn’t seem much interested in charity,” Ginchy said.

  “They didn’t say no.”

  “You have a tender heart.”

  “You do, too, sir.”

  The next morning, in a truck driven by the quartermaster’s assistant and loaded with flour, rice, beans, and some work clothes left behind in the Depression, Russ rode north to Tuba City. In his innocence, he’d pictured tepees or log cabins in Indian country, tall trees with horses tied to them, clear streams running past mossy stones; he’d actually pictured mossy stones. The arid bleakness of the landscape he entered, after crossing Route 66, had not been imaginable. Dust hung in the air and coated every rock along the road. Lifeless buttes shimmered in the distance. Out on the parched plain were hogans more like piles of refuse than dwellings. In the settlements were houses of unpainted gray wood, roofless adobe ruins with holes in their walls, expanses of ash-darkened sand littered with rusted cans and broken roof tiles. Some of the smaller children, black-haired and round-faced, waved tentatively at the truck. Everyone else—old women wearing leggings beneath their skirts, old men with caved-in mouths, younger women who looked like they’d been born brokenhearted—averted their eyes.

  Tuba City was a proper town, better shaded by cottonwoods, but scarcely less bleak. Russ now saw how comparatively much like Lesser Hebron the high forest was; how comparatively paradisal. The streams there were full, the forest double-carpeted with snow and pine needles, everything wet and white and fresh-smelling, and the men there, too—every last one of them—were white. To enter the reservation was to become aware of whiteness. Until he took a train to Arizona, Russ had never been more than sixty miles from Lesser Hebron, and although some of the non-Mennonite farmers had been ruined by the Depression, he’d never seen true privation. The Navajos had been stuck with barren land, seldom rained on. Witnessing their endurance of it, he had a curious sense of inferiority. The Navajos seemed closer to something he hadn’t known he was so far from. He felt, from his white height, like a Pharisee.

  “Jesus Christ, this place is depressing,” the assistant quartermaster said.

  The house to which they were directed seemed unfittingly tiny for a tribal leader, but a familiar black truck was parked in the dirt outside it, its front end elevated on stacks of earthen bricks. Charlie Durochie was watching a younger man hammer on a wrench connected to the truck’s undercarriage. One of the tires lay next to an emaciated dog licking its penis. From the doorway of the house, which stood open to the cold, a little girl in a frilly, faded dress stared at the white men in their better truck. Russ hopped out and reintroduced himself to Durochie, who was dressed exactly as he’d been the day before.

  “What do you have,” Durochie said.

  “What Mr. Ginchy promised. Some food, some clothes.”

  Durochie nodded as if the delivery were more burden than relief. From beneath the old truck came a thud, a strong oath, a wrench skittering out into the dirt. In Russ’s grandfather’s shop, it was a sin against a wrench to hammer on it. Always better, Clement said, to use leverage.

  “Do you have a longer wrench?” Russ couldn’t help asking.

  “If I had a longer wrench,” the younger man said coldly, “would I be using this one?”

  He reached for the wrench, and Russ extended a hand to shake. “Russ Hildebrandt.”

  The man ignored the hand and picked up the wrench. His shoulders were broad in a chamois shirt, his hair tied in a ponytail that had no gray in it. He might have been fifteen years older than Russ, but it was hard to tell with Indian faces.

  “Keith is my brother’s son,” Durochie remarked.

  In a canvas bag in the cab of the camp truck, Russ found a longer wrench. Keith took it from him as if he expected no less. Russ asked Charlie where they should put the supplies.

  “Here,” Charlie said.

  “Just on the ground?”

  Apparently yes. By the time Russ and his partner had unloaded the sacks of food and two bales of clothing, Charlie had disappeared. The little girl now sat in the dirt watching Keith hammer on a steering arm. “What’s your name?” Russ asked her.

  She looked uncertainly at Keith, who stopped hammering. “Her name is Stella.”

  “Nice to meet you, Stella.” To Keith, Russ added, “You can keep the wrench.”

  “Okay.”

  “I wish there were more we could do.”

  Keith sighted along the steering arm, checking its shape. Already then, he had a presence that later served him as a tribal politician, a charisma that invited touch and trust. Russ just wanted to keep looking at him. The assistant quartermaster was in the camp truck, tapping his fingers on the wheel. The thing about a Navajo silence was the sense that it could last indefinitely—all day.

  “Say we sent a crew up here,” Russ said. “What would we do?”

  “I told my uncle not to bother with you. All he got was a broken truck.”

  “I’d like to help, though.”

  “My uncle thinks from a different time. I try to tell him the new lesson, but he won’t learn.”

  “What is the lesson?”

  “Your help is worse than no help.”

  “But if I came back with a crew? What would be entailed, exactly?”

  “Go home, Long Wrench. We don’t want your help.”

  When Russ returned to the reservation, two months later, Keith Durochie continued to call him Long Wrench, possibly a reference to his height, more probably to his thinking he knew better. Being given a nickname was traditional, but he didn’t know this when he left that day. He felt disliked by someone he wished had liked him. In the weeks that followed, whenever he had hours of leave in Flagstaff, he went to the library and read what he could find about the Navajos. Despite being intransigent and thieving—to the point where they were rounded up and marched, en masse, to a prison camp in New Mexico—they’d been granted an immense piece of territory, which, according to various authors, and in contrast to the peace-loving, farm-tending Hopis, they’d proceeded to overgraze with herds of horses too numerous to be of practical use. To the U.S. government, the Navajos were a problem to be solved by force. To Russ, who was haunted by their faces, what needed solving was the mystery of them. He later had the same feeling about Marion.

  In June, after Germany’s unconditional surrender, when the mood in camp was festive, he again raised the question of the Navajos with Ginchy. “We should be there, not here,” he said. “If I could show you the reservation, you’d see what I mean.”

  “You want to go back there,” Ginchy said.

  “Yes, sir. Very much.”

  “You’re a strange one.”

  “How so?”

  “A lot of men would kill for what you’ve got. People used to come here and vacation.”

  “It doesn’t seem right to be on vacation when other men are dying.”

  “You don’t feel fortu
nate. You’re not happy to be my aide-de-camp.”

  “No, sir. I feel very fortunate. But I’d rather serve people in real need.”

  “That speaks well of you. I’m afraid you’ll have to wait another twenty months, though.”

  Russ’s disappointment must have been obvious. An hour later, when he was typing a report on camp hygiene, Ginchy came out to his desk with a roughly scrawled letter and asked him to do it up on letterhead. Reading the scrawl, Russ felt as though warm syrup were being poured over his head. It was love that worked miracles; no force on earth was more powerful.

  To whom it may concern: I am the director of etc. etc. My assistant R.H. wishes to inquire into work needing performance on the N reservation. Please give him any assistance he may require. Yours etc. etc.

  “Nobody cares what I do anymore,” Ginchy said. “My only concern is your safety. You can take the old Willys if you can get it running, but you’ll need to bring a partner.”

  Though Russ was friendly with the men in his cabin, Ginchy’s favoritism hadn’t endeared him to them, and neither had Russ’s seriousness. The camp was like college that way.

  “I’d rather go alone, sir.”

  “That’s very Indian of you, but I’m the one in hot water if something happens to you.”

  “Things can happen to two people, too.”

  “Not as often.”

  “I don’t need a partner. You can trust me.”

  “That also is Indian. I offer you an apple, and you want the whole basket. Speaking of which—‘Thank you’?”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “I will, of course, expect a full formal report.”

  For his mission, after he’d repaired the Willys, Russ packed a bedroll, a change of clothes, his Bible, a notebook, twenty dollars of saved allowance, a canteen, toilet paper, and a box of food. He was still so dazzled by his luck that he was halfway down the forest road, on the morning of June 20, before it occurred to him to be afraid. He could be robbed or beaten up. The truck could wind up in a ditch. By the time he reached Tuba City, he ached from the work of keeping the Willys on the road. His shirt was soaked in the June heat.